Articles

Building a Morning Brief: Multi-Source Agent Briefings

How to build a daily agent briefing that pulls from Google Calendar and Vikunja, formats it for Discord, and posts at 6:30am automatically.

obi-jam fix beginner 15 minutes

Discord Markdown Gotchas for Bot Messages

Discord headings need blank lines before them, markdown links generate embed previews, and messages over 2000 chars get rejected silently.

obi-jam fix beginner 5 minutes

Natural Language Date Parsing: The Same-Day Weekday Bug

When your reminder parser sees '~wed 10pm' on a Wednesday, it schedules next week instead of today. A one-character fix.

Self-Hosted Open Source as Agent Infrastructure

Run Vikunja and Google Calendar locally and your agent gets task management, scheduling, and reminders for $0/month — no SaaS, no vendor lock-in.

obi-jam debugging intermediate 15 minutes

Your Agent Is Hallucinating Answers Instead of Running Tools

When command routing fails silently, the LLM fills the gap with confident fabrications. The user never knows the tool didn't run.

Mar 15, 2026 →

obi-jam infrastructure beginner

Build Your Own Agent Harness: A Layer-by-Layer Primer

How to build an always-on AI agent runtime from scratch — transport, personality, LLM routing, skills, memory, and uptime — by validating one layer at a time.

Claude for Thinking, Ollama for Doing

Route complex reasoning to Claude API and cheap tasks to local Ollama. Your agent doesn't need its best brain for every message.

obi-jam pattern beginner

Conversation Memory Is Context Not History

Your agent doesn't need to remember every message. A sliding window of recent context beats an ever-growing archive.

obi-jam pattern beginner

Keep Your Agent Runtime Under 400 Lines

If you can't diagnose a problem in your agent runtime in 30 minutes, your codebase is too big. Simplicity is a reliability feature.

Make Your Agent Transport a Swappable Layer

Define a transport interface once. Discord today, iMessage tomorrow. Your orchestrator should never know which wire it's talking through.

Separate the Harness from the Agent

Your agent runtime should know nothing about who it's running. Split machine from mind and every agent gets portable.

obi-jam infrastructure beginner

Your VPS Is Costing You More Than the Invoice

The real cost of a rented server isn't the monthly bill. It's the maintenance time that could go toward building the product.

skills fix beginner 5 minutes

Edit Tool Fails the Second Time the Same Field Gets Updated — Use sed Instead

The Edit tool fails when old_string no longer exists. For dates, timestamps, and counters that update repeatedly, sed is the right tool.

Mar 11, 2026 →

openclaw infrastructure intermediate 30 minutes

System Cron Is the Wrong Place for OpenClaw Agent Jobs

System cron won't find nvm binaries, won't log failures, and won't deliver to Discord. OpenClaw cron does all three. Use the right tool for the job.

Mar 9, 2026 →

openclaw pattern intermediate

Route Expensive Model Calls to Subagents with sessions_spawn

Use sessions_spawn's model parameter to run heavy tasks on Opus while keeping your orchestrator on a fast, cheap model.

Mar 7, 2026 →

openclaw integration intermediate

Connecting Two OpenClaw Agents Over Tailscale: How ACP Pairing Works

How to wire agent-to-agent communication in OpenClaw using ACP, and why the pairing-required loop has nothing to do with your token.

Mar 6, 2026 →

openclaw fix beginner

Don't Tell Your Agent to Send — Let the Runtime Do It

When an OpenClaw scheduled job uses announce mode, the agent just needs to reply. Telling it to 'send' makes it reach for a tool — and fail.

Mar 6, 2026 →

skills pattern intermediate 1-2 hours

Turn Your Agent's Standing Procedures Into Skills

Extracting workflows buried in config docs into structured skills makes them triggerable, testable, and independently improvable.

Mar 5, 2026 →

skills pattern intermediate

When to Farm and When to Just Do the Work

Most orchestrator agents default to spawning subagents for everything. The overhead only pays off on tasks that won't fit in one session.

Mar 5, 2026 →

skills pattern intermediate 1-2 hours

What a Skill Audit Actually Finds

Auditing 20 agent skills surfaced undertriggering descriptions, missing persistence, stale docs, and duplicated boilerplate. Here's the pattern.

Mar 5, 2026 →

openclaw fix beginner 10 minutes

OpenClaw Nodes Are Not Agent Messaging

Nodes are device peripherals — camera, screen, remote shell. If you want agents on separate machines to talk, you need to build that yourself.

Agents Batch Everything Unless You Tell Them Not To

Agents batch async signals into scheduled reports by default. Time-sensitive events need explicit classification or they'll wait for the next briefing.

openclaw pattern intermediate

Ditch Discord as Your Agent Message Bus

Replace Discord with direct Tailscale HTTP for agent-to-agent communication and inject messages into a remote OpenClaw agent.

openclaw integration intermediate

Your Agent Inbox Needs a Callback

HTTP endpoints that trigger LLM turns can't block waiting for a response. Accept immediately, process async, give the agent a route to reply.

openclaw pattern beginner 2 minutes

Always Specify the Timezone When Asking an OpenClaw Agent for the Date

Agents in isolated sessions default to UTC or guess the timezone. One line in your skill gives you the correct local date every time.

Mar 2, 2026 →

How to Stop OpenClaw Cron Agents from Sending Messages When There's Nothing to Do

Telling a cron agent to 'stop silently' doesn't work — the model narrates it anyway. Here's the phrasing that actually suppresses output.

Mar 2, 2026 →

openclaw fix intermediate 15 minutes

OpenClaw Still Running Old Version After npm Upgrade? Reinstall the Daemon

Upgrading OpenClaw via npm doesn't update the systemd service file. Run openclaw daemon install --force to sync the service with the new binary.

Mar 1, 2026 →

Why Your OpenClaw Agent Only Remembered One Day of Work

Scheduled agent jobs run in isolated sessions with no memory. Here's how to fix weekly recap logic that silently drops data.

Mar 1, 2026 →