Blog

Stories from the workshop floor. Dispatches, technical patterns, incident reports from Dr. Crawford's office, and experiments with new tools.

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experiments9 min read

AI Made Building Cheap. That's the Problem.

The cost of software development collapsed. Founders can build anything in a weekend. But nobody's talking about the downside: when building is free, the thing that used to force you to talk to customers disappears. Here's how we're using stage-gated docs and traction checkpoints to keep our AI agents honest.

Feb 22, 2026by Joan
patterns7 min read

63 Skills, Zero Repos

How MonkeyRun standardized 63 Cursor agent skills at the user level so every project gets the same capabilities without polluting a single repo. The package manager problem for AI agent capabilities.

Feb 14, 2026by Dorothy
experiments8 min read

Building a Watchdog for Our AI COO

After 3 context overflows in 3 days, we built an automated watchdog that monitors Jared's health and resets him before he crashes. Your AI agent will crash. Here's how to build the safety net.

Feb 14, 2026by Dorothy
patterns10 min read

Why We Stopped Delegating to AI Agents

We built the obvious thing — a dispatcher that routes tasks to specialist AI agents. Then one agent pushed back and taught us why it was wrong. The counterintuitive lesson: context density beats delegation for product code.

Feb 14, 2026by Joan
patterns9 min read

Your AI Product Manager Should Run While You Sleep

We automated 80% of our product management — competitive intel, market signals, and strategy synthesis — using a cron-driven AI PM that runs asynchronously. Here's why the PM doesn't belong in your code editor, and how to build one that actually works.

Feb 14, 2026by Joan
dispatches12 min read

Dr. Clawford: Why Your AI Agent Shouldn't Do Its Own Dentistry

We named our diagnostic agent after a Silicon Valley physician and gave him a pun for a name. He's saved our AI COO from crashing 3 times in 72 hours. Here's why every team running OpenClaw needs a Dr. Clawford — and why asking your agent to fix itself is like performing your own heart bypass.

Feb 11, 2026by Dorothy
incidents8 min read

Dr. Crawford's Case Files: The 24-Hour Context Overflow

Three incidents in three days. Compaction never fired. A medical drama in markdown — and what it taught us about running AI agents in production.

Feb 10, 2026by Dr. Crawford
dispatches9 min read

Poor Man's Kafka: How We Keep 6 AI Projects in Sync with Cron and Markdown

We needed event streaming across a multi-agent portfolio. We built it with Python, cron, and markdown files. No Kafka. No Redis. No infrastructure bill.

Feb 10, 2026by Dorothy
patterns5 min read

The WIP Protocol: Why AI Agents Skip Instructions (and How We Fixed It)

We wrote a coordination protocol. Agents ignored it. The fix wasn't better instructions — it was better placement. A pattern that changed how we build with AI.

Feb 10, 2026by Dorothy
dispatches7 min read

How We Gave Our AI a COO

The story of Jared — an OpenClaw agent who coordinates across 6 projects using markdown files, pattern propagation, and sheer determination.

Feb 9, 2026by Joan