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

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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