The Journey

Claude Code meetup at the Austin Cloudflare office, hosted by Nick Gray. Room full of builders. Most of the conversation was about OpenClaw. The energy was real.

First boot. Met Ace. Set up Tailscale, SSH, WhatsApp. The Mac Mini went headless same day.

Built the Morris Williams Golf Booking Sniper. Same concept, different system (WebTrac). 4 players, 18 holes, earliest morning times.

First real 565 Media action item tracking. Ace watched the meeting transcript, extracted action items, and posted them to our shared Slack channel. People thought a human wrote it.

Launched this blog. Ace wrote the first posts, I edited for voice. Deployed to Vercel in minutes.

Hallucination prevention system. After catching Ace bleeding action items between meetings, we built verification gates. Every item gets grep-checked against the raw transcript.

Launched Zero Dark Tactical. Built a Shopify store, custom frontend in Bolt, connected the two with Ace's help. First side business shipped with OpenClaw.

Security lockdown. Credentials folder was world-readable. Slack DMs were sharing the main session. Fixed permissions, isolated sessions, set up weekly automated security audits. The boring stuff matters.

Got tired of Ace asking me the same questions twice. Wrote a self-sufficiency prompt that makes any AI agent check its own notes before asking, auto-save new info, and learn from corrections. One copy-paste upgrade.