Story 4: The pain

By then I’d run my course with Gemini, and Claude was all the rage. I dove in headfirst and left my old friend Gemini behind. From the start, Claude got what I was doing and how I wanted to do it. It was brilliant at planning and steering the code.

I remember one intense weekend in particular. We’d built AgentGate, a gatekeeper for the new AI assistant we were working on, and set up Caddy to route traffic. Then I hit a problem with the containers and WSL, the Linux layer inside Windows. Claude said to just do “this.” I did “this,” and suddenly everything was gone: all the running containers and most of the structure. Claude said, “Oh, sorry, I shouldn’t have told you to do that.” The damage was done. I’d said from the start that starting over was familiar territory, but this one really hurt.

By then I’d also filled most of my 500 GB drive, so I splurged on a 1 TB M.2 drive. While I was at it, I wiped Windows along with every leftover trace of ClawdBot and started fresh.

That kicked off glory days, part two. Once I got past the loss, I was going to do it right this time: a local Git setup and “Masterplan 2.” Those were a great few weeks. I’d learned so much, and Claude and I had made our peace with the mistake. We planned this one out properly.

Along the way I realized the 8 GB card wasn’t going to cut it. Llama 3 8B was fine as a starter, but I needed something better. I watched Mac Minis sitting around $599, hoping they’d drop another $50, but with OpenClaw all the rage it wasn’t meant to be. So I pivoted to an RTX 5060 Ti with 16 GB for $599 and never looked back.

Now I had a fresh Windows 11 Pro install on the 1 TB drive, and the old 500 GB drive, where IronClaw survived only as documentation and leftovers. IronClaw was moving right along, and this was going to be the thing that changed everything. Gemma 4 was coming out, and the new 16 GB card could handle it.

Except tool calling wasn’t great. By now I’d rebuilt AgentGate, added LibreChat, kept Caddy, and swapped CalDAV for Baïkal, a small self-hosted calendar server. Things still weren’t right. In fact, Lucy, my local AI, and Ricky, my Hermes agent, rarely saw eye to eye. They fought like a couple thirty years into a marriage.

I was ready to give up on my dreams.

Every build has a low point. This was mine.