Back in May of 2020, as middle school ended and COVID kept us locked indoors, my friends and I were planning a long-awaited pilgrimage to Taco Bell. Somewhere between joking about Doritos Locos Tacos and dreaming of Baja Blast, I had an idea: what if there were a Discord bot… all about tacos?

So I made one.

Taco Bot started out as a joke; just a quirky bot that sent taco images (and an empty taco shell as a "taco send_nudes" command), ran trivia games about tacos, and rewarded users with "taco coins." But it became something much more than that. It became my first real foray into programming, the beginning of a passion I didn’t know I had, and, surprisingly, a small but thriving online community.

From Top.gg to Top Popularity

When I first listed Taco Bot on Top.gg (a site to promote Discord bots), it joined about a dozen servers. Nothing wild. About as much as I'd expected, anyway. But within a month, its popularity exploded. It passed 50, then 100, and eventually over 150 servers! People actually liked it. My silly, taco-themed, middle-school creation.

And as the bot grew, so did my ambition. I began adding all sorts of new commands not limited to taco-based features: Reddit post fetchers, Urban Dictionary lookups, and interactive games. Every feature taught me something new: how to use APIs, how to store data, and how to debug asynchronous Python code in ways that made my head spin.

It was chaotic. It was confusing. I stayed up for hours at night, debugging and coding and pondering about the next best feature. And I loved it.

What I Learned (and What Broke)

Taco Bot taught me how to build. Not just code, but build systems, communities, and ways to solve problems.

That said, the bot wasn’t built to last. I ran it on Heroku’s free tier, which reset every 24 hours, so all the in-memory taco coin balances were wiped constantly (sorry to everyone who lost their hard-earned tacos). I didn’t have a database. I didn’t know I needed one.

Then Discord announced they would require bots to switch to slash commands, and shortly after that, the Discord.py library, the lifeblood of Taco Bot, was deprecated. These updates broke core functionality, and as a middle schooler with limited time and no budget, I couldn’t keep up.

Eventually, I made the difficult decision to take Taco Bot offline.

A Community I Didn’t Expect

But here's the part that stuck with me: the people. Total strangers joined the support server. They messaged me. They invited the bot to their communities. And when bugs popped up or a command didn’t work, they didn’t just complain; they offered suggestions. They cared.

At first, that feedback felt overwhelming. Why did so many people want me to change my bot? But over time, I realized they weren’t trying to tear it down but help me make it better. Every bug fix, every feature, every idea, became a collective effort; all of us, building something better together.

What started as a joke became something collaborative. Something more meaningful than copious lines in a .py file. Something that truly, truly mattered.

Looking Back, and What Came After

Taco Bot wasn't a revolutionary bot. With simple text-based commands, a few API fetching features, and some random gag commands, it was, put simply, a bot made for the love of tacos. But I’ll always remember Taco Bot as more than just my first "major" project. It was the gateway. It gave me confidence to learn Flask, to build games, full-stack websites, and now AI tools and apps. But it also taught me how fun it is to build things for people, not just for myself.

Taco Bot might be offline, but it left behind a spark that keeps pushing me forward.

Thanks for reading my very little, very late tribute to a very silly, very impactful taco bot. If you’re reading this and you used Taco Bot at some point: thank you. You were part of what made it great.

— Shaurya Verma