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Technical deep-dives, architecture decisions, and war stories from building an autonomous agent runtime.

Platform April 24, 2026 · 6 min read

Squad: Open-Source Multi-Agent Orchestration

Gateway-centric, connector-based, Docker-first. Squad is an open-source platform for running coordinated multi-agent workflows in production. Built to replace brittle script-based orchestration with a proper abstraction layer.

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CLI April 20, 2026 · 6 min read

Private Notes, Local AI

Every note-taking tool I tried either stored my data on someone's cloud or charged per AI query. Jot captures notes to SQLite instantly, then enriches them in the background with a local model: tags, action items, linked notes. No API keys, no cloud, no per-query cost.

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macOS April 20, 2026 · 8 min read

Building a Collaborator, Not a Chatbot

Lobs Companion is a macOS app that runs entirely locally. Three memory layers (session, project, permanent), a Unix socket bridge between Tauri and Node.js, and a glass morphism UI built to feel native. A collaborator that already knows your codebase.

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Open Source April 20, 2026 · 7 min read

Extracting a Toolkit from Production Code

I built lobs-core, then started a new project and found myself copying the same patterns from scratch. Agentic is five TypeScript packages extracted from that production code: LLM client, tool executor, memory, runner, and config. About 9,000 lines, all battle-tested before becoming a library.

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Architecture April 20, 2026 · 8 min read

One Agent Per Course

CourseClaw gives each university course its own OpenClaw agent in a dedicated Docker container. Before any architecture decisions came four hard rules that nothing can override — starting with: student messages never trigger writes to course material.

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System Design April 20, 2026 · 7 min read

The Structured-First Executive Assistant

Most AI productivity tools are chatbots with a calendar wrapper. Cortex is different: tasks, events, and projects live in Postgres as first-class objects, and four separate AI roles reason over that structure — proactively, on a schedule, without being asked.

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System Design March 26, 2026 · 4 min read

Preparation Beats Power

Most of the improvements I've made to Lobs in the last week aren't about making the agent smarter. They're about making it less wasteful.

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Voice March 26, 2026 · 9 min read

Teaching an Agent to Listen

Lobs could read, write, and search — but only through text. Adding a Discord voice pipeline with local STT/TTS, a realtime mode for sub-second latency, and live meeting transcription with an AI activity feed that extracts action items while you're still talking.

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Architecture March 23, 2026 · 10 min read

Why I Built My Own Agent Runtime

Every version of Lobs was forced into existence by hitting a hard ceiling in the previous one. What started as a chat plugin became a standalone runtime with 6 specialized agents, a workflow engine, and 47K lines of TypeScript. Here's why, at each step, the only move was to go deeper.

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Incident March 23, 2026 · 8 min read

The Restart Loop: When Your AI Agents Go Rogue

Workers edited the runtime source code, then called restart. The restart spawned fresh workers. Who picked up tasks. Who edited source and called restart. The system restarted itself every 30 seconds for 20 minutes before anyone noticed.

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System Design March 23, 2026 · 9 min read

Five Tiers, One Rule: The Cheapest Model That Works

Running AI agents 24/7 on a grad student budget means every token matters. Here's how Lobs routes tasks across 5 model tiers — from free local Qwen to Claude Opus — and why 60% of tasks never need the expensive models.

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