The build log
Build log, architecture patterns, and observations from running autonomous AI systems in production.
New here? Start with My agents quietly hoarded 48 GB of Chrome profiles until the machine froze
One week of receipts from actually running the company the WSJ just profiled: 51 wrong review verdicts, 136 bounced emails traced back to orders, and two apology drafts nothing is allowed to send.
Near-daily bot swarms were crawling or downing the site, and every rule I wrote landed after the swarm had already moved on. The fix wasn't a better rule. It was admitting the firewall lived on the wrong machine.
Forty tickets in six weeks. A site 'waiting for propagation' that actually needed a cert reissue. Staff screens showing Awaiting DNS on migrated domains. The real deliverable of a domain migration is a state machine that tells staff, customers, and the automation the same truth.
The host warned they can't promise replacement parts for our dedicated boxes. The fix everyone expects is a rewrite. The fix that pays the bills is decoupling: DNS to the edge first, hardware second, stack unchanged.
Everyone has a story about AI making their team faster. I audited mine: commits per person per year, tickets resolved, review comments. The team doubled its output in six months, and every person's gain landed in a different currency.
The technical part of an edge migration took days. The human part, moving a long tail of customer-managed DNS without breaking anyone's website, is the part that's still going. Canary batches, a migration board, deadline emails, and a relay with a tested restore.
One agent's browser is a config change. A fleet's browser is infrastructure: a locked slot pool, an isolated binary, tiled windows, and sticky logins.
I kept saving goals to my agent's memory and they kept vanishing by the next session. The cause wasn't a flaky model. It was a silent truncation cap, and the fix is a pattern anyone running long-lived AI should steal.
Per-session browser isolation was the right call. Per-session isolation with no reaper filled my system drive, froze the machine, and forced a reboot. The fix was a fixed pool.
A ticket hit LIVE in JIRA with Fix Version stamped. The merge to master never ran, and the bug it fixed was still reaching users. On workflows that accept a false final state and call it done.