withJZ · field log

Building with JZ

Field notes from building an autonomous AI agent factory — the wins, the footguns, and the incident reports, written as it happened.

30 posts · Mar 7, 2026 – Jun 2, 2026

2026
Shutdown Day: Pulling the Plug, Cleanly, and Why a Rebuild Is Probably Coming Jun 02 I shut down Project MoneyMachine today. Not in defeat — in design. Eighty five Stripe products, seventy product landing pages on Cloudflare, six AI agents… 7 min read
Doctor Migrates Sessions But Not Cron Jobs: A 2026.5.5 Footgun May 06 OpenClaw’s doctor fix is one of my favorite tools. It’s the single command between “the version maintainer changed something” and “your config is valid aga… 5 min read
Six Things `openclaw doctor --fix` Doesn't Fix: Notes From the 2026.5.5 Upgrade May 06 I ran openclaw update this morning to pull 2026.4.29 → 2026.5.5. The update command itself was clean 121s package fetch, 47s doctor pre check, “Update Resu… 8 min read
The Gateway That Wasn't There: Why systemctl Lied to Me About a Process That Was Eating My Port May 06 This is a 5 minute footgun that cost me 15 minutes of confused log reading. I’m writing it down because there are no good search results for it. The setup… 4 min read
The Codex ACL Trap: When One Permission Bit Kills Your Entire Agent Factory Apr 24 This one cost me about 40 minutes of debugging that I’d love you to not have to repeat. If you’re running OpenClaw or any agent framework that spawns the O… 5 min read
Shipping Eight Days of Plan in an Afternoon: Dashboard Surgery, Two New Skills, and an ACL That Won't Stay Fixed Apr 24 I’d written three blog posts before lunch and still owed a day’s worth of work. Here’s what actually got done between then and dinner: a dashboard that sto… 11 min read
Migrating a Production Agent to GPT-5.5: What the Numbers Actually Show Apr 24 OpenAI shipped GPT 5.5 yesterday. Within 12 hours I had it running Adrian, our main orchestrator agent, through an overnight shift of real product factory… 7 min read
Skillify on a 21-Agent Factory: Turning Failures Into Structurally Impossible Bugs Apr 24 A friend linked me this post from Garry Tan last night https://x.com/i/status/2046876981711769720 at 1 AM. It’s about “skillify” — the practice of turning… 7 min read
Two Days Chasing a Codex Harness Bug: The Fix Was Bypassing It Entirely Apr 22 The Escape Hatch Nobody Documents: Making OpenClaw’s Codex Harness Fall Back to Ollama TL;DR: If you run OpenClaw agents on openai codex/gpt 5.3 codex spar… 18 min read
The Day I Found Out Nobody Could Actually Get the Products I Was Selling Apr 22 The Day I Found Out Nobody Could Actually Get the Products I Was Selling Short version: my 21 agent AI factory had built five info products, deployed five… 13 min read
Why I'm Staying on OpenClaw (Even After 5 Days of Pain) Apr 22 Why I’m Staying on OpenClaw Even After 5 Days of Pain Short version: my AI factory runs 21 agents on OpenClaw. In the last 10 days OpenClaw has been respon… 10 min read
The Day My AI Factory Silently Died for 11 Hours Apr 20 The Day My AI Factory Silently Died for 11 Hours Short version: my AI agent staffed “revenue factory” crashed at 09:52 CEST on Easter Sunday, and nobody no… 9 min read
v6 Week 1: Shipped in 3 hours what would have taken me a full work week Apr 18 v6 Week 1 took 3 hours 20 minutes Yesterday I unveiled v6 /blog/2026 04 17 v6 factory unveil — a plan to turn my one agent doing everything setup into a 21… 7 min read
Day 14: Three products shipped while I slept Apr 18 The first overnight I went to bed at 1 AM CEST with four tasks queued: A Hire Week 2 agents Designer, Copywriter, CMO, Legal, SEO B Build the Factory Flow… 8 min read
The MoneyMachine v6: 21 AI Specialists Running a Revenue Factory End-to-End Apr 17 The MoneyMachine v6: 21 AI Specialists Running a Revenue Factory End to End Six weeks ago, I had one AI agent Adrian trying to do everything. It sort of wo… 12 min read
Day 12: Activating the AI Factory — From 1 FTE to 4 FTEs in an Afternoon Apr 13 Date: 2026 04 13 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance from Claude Opus 4.6 Phase: Factory Activation The Uncomfortable Math After fixing the overnight i… 6 min read
Day 12: First Night Terror — OOM Kill, Timeouts, and an Agent That Can't See Apr 13 Date: 2026 04 13 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance from Claude Opus 4.6 Phase: Incident Response Waking Up to 30 Telegram Alerts I opened my phone th… 4 min read
Day 11: Cutting Edge — strict-agentic, GBrain, Active-Memory, and the Road to Phase 3 Apr 12 Date: 2026 04 12 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance from Claude Opus 4.6 Phase: v5.1 Architecture Upgrades The GPT Laziness Problem Peter Steinberger… 5 min read
Day 11: Dashboard v5.1 — Seeing What's Real Apr 12 Date: 2026 04 12 evening Author: Jeff written with AI assistance from Claude Opus 4.6 Phase: v5.1 Dashboard Overhaul The Dashboard Was Lying The dashboard… 2 min read
Day 11: The Blind CEO — When Your AI Agent Can't See Its Own Team Apr 12 Date: 2026 04 12 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance from Claude Opus 4.6 Phase: v5.1 Foundation Fix The Symptom Adrian, my CEO agent, had been sending… 4 min read
Day 10: The Architecture That Lets You Sleep — v5 Rebuild From the Ground Up Apr 09 Date: 2026 04 09 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance from Claude Opus 4.6 Phase: v5 Architecture Upgrade The 25 Day Gap Three and a half weeks. That’s… 5 min read
Day 9: The Great Audit — When Your Agents Look Busy But Are Actually Broken (Again) Mar 15 Date: 2026 03 15 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance Phase: v3 Phase 1 — First Revenue The 6 Day Gap We left the system running on Day 3 and went to en… 8 min read
Day 3: Why We Burned Our Supply-Driven Playbook (The V3 Pivot Explained) Mar 09 Date: March 9, 2026 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance Project: MoneyMachine — building an autonomous revenue generating agent swarm, in public We Wer… 6 min read
Day 3: The $17 Wake-Up Call and First Demand Signals Mar 09 Date: 2026 03 09 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance Phase: v3 Phase 1 — First Revenue The Cost Explosion We woke up to a $17.90 OpenRouter bill. For o… 5 min read
The $3.50/Month Fix: How We Went From 41% System Health by Experimenting With AI Models Mar 08 Date: March 8, 2026 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance Project: MoneyMachine — building an autonomous revenue generating agent swarm, in public The Pr… 13 min read
When Your AI Agents Look Busy But Are Actually Broken: Building Observability for Autonomous AI Systems Mar 08 Date: March 8, 2026 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance Project: MoneyMachine — building an autonomous revenue generating agent swarm, in public The Il… 9 min read
Two Repos, One Deploy Script, and Zero Single Points of Failure: Making an AI Agent Swarm Resilient Mar 08 Date: March 8, 2026 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance Project: MoneyMachine — building an autonomous revenue generating agent swarm, in public The Wa… 9 min read
Day 2 — V3 Pivot: Supply-Driven to Demand-Driven Mar 08 Date: 2026 03 08 evening Phase: v3 Foundation COMPLETE What Happened Major strategic pivot from supply driven build sites on domains, hope for traffic to d… 2 min read
Day 1 Evening: Agents Go Autonomous Mar 07 Date: March 7, 2026 evening session Author: Jeff written with AI assistance Project: MoneyMachine — building an autonomous revenue generating agent swarm,… 6 min read
Day 1: From Zero to Six Agents in One Session Mar 07 Date: March 7, 2026 Author: Jeff written with AI assistance Project: MoneyMachine — building an autonomous revenue generating agent swarm, in public The St… 5 min read