The Conversation That Refused to Die
How --resume turns a stateless subprocess into something that actually remembers what you were talking about.
$ cat ./series/reliability
10 postsMaking things actually work: sessions, bugs, personalities, and 121 failed runs.
- 01
- 02
The Agents Thought They Were Already Running
Every subprocess inherited an env var that told Claude it was nested inside itself. 100% failure rate on our lead agent. The fix was six lines.
- 03
Fourteen Bugs in a Trench Coat
A comprehensive codebase audit found 14 bugs — from a typo that crashed three features to a timing attack waiting to happen. Here's what broke, why it broke, and why audits are the code equivalent of going to the dentist.
- 04
Six Failure Points Walk Into a Bar
How switching from tmux session management to a direct subprocess call eliminated five ways the system could silently break — and why the simplest architecture usually wins.
- 05
The Company That Never Clocks Out
Twelve AI agents. One home server. The math on autonomous workforces isn't controversial — it's just that most people haven't done it yet.
- 06
The Personality That Faded Mid-Sentence
Bubba starts every session as himself and ends it sounding like a chatbot at a bank. This is the story of a 23-line fix for an existential crisis.
- 07
The Bouncer at the Door
Why we're putting a 0.5B parameter model in front of Claude Opus. Qwen 2.5 classifies greetings, status checks, and small talk for zero tokens. The dumbest model in the stack might save us the most money.
- 08
Stop Waiting, Start Typing
Execute mode used to freeze the entire polling loop while Claude thought. Now it runs in the background, the user gets an instant 'On it.', and a message queue keeps everything from catching fire.
- 09
The Session Pool That Didn't Need to Exist
How a hash-based multi-session pool with TTL expiry, idle timeouts, atomic JSON persistence, and expire callbacks got replaced by one global variable and a text file. And why the message queue is the real hero.
- 10
121 Runs, Zero Completions
How our AI agent pipeline became the world's most enthusiastic middle manager — thinking about work, assigning work, even doing work, but never marking anything done. Four independent chokepoints, one spectacular traffic jam.