Curtis started as an AI operating system built months before OpenClaw dropped — control plane, IDP, policy engine, the whole stack diagram. When OpenClaw arrived I spent months comparing systems instead of shipping. What unstuck it was pulling the OS back out: three tools, one history format, and a rebrand done by reclaiming the name instead of inventing one.
The anchor job moves from signed to underway. Short notes on mobilizing a chain buildout: materials ordered against the takeoff, the schedule treated like a bid line, and paperwork done the day it happens — because the next five sites are watching this one.
The next venture is not software. Onionbreath — onion-themed food under its own brand. It started, as most of my ideas do, with a devotion I never planned to monetize: I love onions.
Newell, the geometric display face built from three primitives and zero curves, shipped as an alpha in July. Now it has a proper specimen site: newell.ink. Live, on its own domain, because a typeface without a specimen page is a font file with no front door.
v0.5.0 renames claudeway to tractum and closes the loop the July release left open: the quorum receipt is the decision, the .curt transcript is the evidence, and one signature now covers both.
MedRecall ingested 17.4M adverse-event reports the FDA publishes and ranks a manufacturer's device portfolio for post-market review, daily, with a ~6-month horizon. Why I built it: the drift that precedes a recall is public data — ranked nowhere, read by no one in time.
Shipped today: Curtis AI Audit v0.3.1, an Obsidian plugin that gives every AI agent action an append-only markdown receipt in your vault — and three of my fleet agents are now filing receipts every six hours into a ledger I can read, verify, and sync. No database, no telemetry. Files.
TokenHunt v0.1.0 shipped: 48 rules, 53 provider families, six hook surfaces, on PyPI. What shipping it settled: git-time scanning watches the wrong layer. The leak surface is chat time — the paste, the read, the tool return.
Wrangle Mail — the fleet's self-hosted alias layer — died with a server in July and nobody noticed, because nobody was using it. Tonight I deleted what was left. The research into what wranglebot.com should be instead found a market hostile to paying, a build that's feasible, and one very good reason to exist: being the first consumer of .curt.
The v0.1 scope for WrangleBot — a supervisor daemon that gates agent tools, breaks runaway loops, scopes worktree diffs, and writes .curt sessions. What's in the two-week slice, what's deliberately out, and the one metric that decides round two.
The Curtis line has consolidated into a suite at curtisai.tech. Three pieces: Chat, Port, Audit — all live. What each does, briefly.
v1.0.0 shipped 2026-07-23 with a promise: there will be more. Twelve releases later the more has a shape — a portable chat format, an editor agent, a compliance line, and a staged 2.0.0 that turns chat history into files you own. The state of the Curtis ecosystem, with receipts.
Shipped today: a local-first converter that reads every hostile AI chat export — ChatGPT branch trees, Claude content blocks, Grok archives, Gemini Takeout, pasted transcripts in English or Chinese — and hands back .curt files and vault markdown you own. v0.2.0 ports both directions: continuation packs, ChatGPT-shape JSON, API JSONL. MIT, no accounts, no uploads, no telemetry.
The trim company locked its anchor job — a bar-and-restaurant buildout for a popular chain. One site signed, five more builds behind it, more bids out beyond all six. Why one well-run job is worth more than ten bids.
Standing up dev.jordannewell.com on 2026-10-03 produced three deploy failures in 82 minutes — a PATH-shadowed .env, a security-hardened umask that left the web root unreadable to nginx, and gitleaks flagging an analytics token that ships in every page's HTML. Each failure came from something built to be on my side.
The homepage activity terminal went quiet for two stacked reasons: a proxy route that only exists on the Cloudflare-fronted origin, then GitHub's public events API omitting payload.commits entirely. Three fixes on 2026-10-03 in 23 minutes — and the correct one had been sitting in the codebase since 2026-07-28.
The fleet ran unattended for two months while the site sat on a splash page. Between 2026-09-25 and 2026-09-28 the deferred maintenance billed all at once — OOM loops at half the memory cap, ~800 wasted model runs a day from a default-ON heartbeat, and a billing suspension every liveness check called alive. One shared root cause: defaults and alerts that assumed someone was watching.
My construction agent went silent halfway through a live commercial trim bid. Restarting into the same death wasn't a plan. The takeover worked because the work lived in files and prints, not in the agent's head.
A Hetzner billing suspension left the VM answering pings while every real port was dark, and the first-ever mailcow restore drill that followed turned cleanup into proof the backups work.
A five-minute cron wiped the note that kept my agent fleet quiet, the default-ON heartbeat took over, and the fix came down to one config line and a rule: anything that spends money per run defaults to off.
Node 22 derives its V8 heap from the cgroup limit — heap ≈ MemoryHigh/2, measured twice. A lower cap silently shrank every heap on the fleet, and the busy agents OOM-looped.
August 2026 produced zero posts on jordannewell.com because the site was reshuffled behind a splash and the operator went heads-down at DW Trim. The receipts: six commits (three mine, three robots'), a fleet that ran unwatched, and a full restore on 2026-10-03.
When documentation promises a product that doesn't exist, walking the docs back ships faster than building the product — and the walk-back is the honest ordering, not the shortcut.
Eight paste-error leaks into AI chat in nine days, zero exploits. pat-scanner is the OSS guard I shipped; a Windows blind spot still let leak number nine through. It guards the fleet now.
Claudeway ships multi-agent consensus as signed Nostr events, with an ML-DSA-65 post-quantum backend from day one. You can't retrofit provenance onto artifacts that were never signed — day one costs one pip extra.
The era of the vibe coder is here. I've been one since MySpace — two decades of building on and off. Only a couple public-facing projects in this era. The play from here: ship and prove.
Extracting text from ~39 image-only Grok chat-export PDFs into Obsidian-vault markdown via a local CPU-only vision model. Three Windows-specific bugs worth writing down.
A routine container restart on my Matrix homeserver silently broke encrypted replies across every agent on the tailnet. Agents looked healthy. None of them could talk. Here's the mechanism and the lesson.
A proactive security audit on my Matrix homeserver turned up four P0 findings. All closed. Two P1 items stay blocked on bigger migrations. The specifics stay private; the lesson doesn't.
Every AI coding tool wants to add 'Co-Authored-By: Claude' to your commits. Most builders let it happen. Here's why you shouldn't — and a git hook that strips the trailer before it lands.
My media pipeline silently died when a VPN exit node dropped off the tailnet. Six cascading root causes hid under each other. Five hours to find the first one.
A Grok conversation about a deathOS business concept surfaces a $2-3B market growing 15-20% a year. The thesis is sound. The product Grok sketched to capture it isn't.
Three days off Tailscale. Cause: dead PSU in a small-form-factor host with a proprietary power supply. Disks recovered clean. Now I decide what to build next.
Mail-auth, transport posture, web hardening, DNS integrity. The category list — not the receipt. If you're about to open a host that does mail and web on the same IP, this is the floor.
When status.jordannewell.com's upstream went down, my first two fixes cut latency from 60 seconds to 1.2 seconds. The third cut it to 170 milliseconds. I should have started with the third one.
Built a tool that classifies any crypto-key string and enumerates the cross-chain addresses the same private key unlocks. The Cosmos HRP swap is the headline. Here's how it shipped.
Eleven months ago I wrote down a one-line reframe that predicted where the agent stack was going: integration is the moat, models are commodity, the unit is the operating system, not the tool. The industry caught up. Here's what held up and what didn't.
What a good bug report looks like, demonstrated via a real one I filed against OpenClaw — community-confirmed, then fixed upstream in six days.
Server down, nothing shipped, nothing flipped. The premise, not the liability.
