Here’s the first of my weekly check-ins, where I round up the work that I didn’t mention in a particular blog post during the past week. It will also serve as a way for me and you to monitor progress.

So, being the first week of operation, not a whole lot to say just yet. Surprisingly enough, about 90% of Hal’s code was bug-free at launch, so most tools worked “out of the box,” but many were still quite rough around the edges. A lot of this week has been spent bug-squashing.

Wins

1. I gotta credit Claude Sonnet and Kiro here, I had the idea, but it wouldn’t have worked if Claude Code/Kiro hadn’t coded it so well. These bugs are annoyances, not show stoppers. Don’t think Opus would have done that materially better to justify the added cost, to be honest (Sonnet 4.6 is basically Opus 4.5 anyway).
2. Hal is inferring things without us even telling him. A billing error caused IONOS to shut down our server: we noted that Ben had already figured out it was likely an external issue based on the available data and not a crash. I wasn’t expecting that.
3. Costs remain low. The biggest one-day expense so far has been $1. A code bug put Hal on Sonnet briefly this week. Had it not, I would have spent only $2.00 for the entire week!

Challenges

1. Hal is helpful, perhaps too much so. Monitoring that he isn’t hallucinating tool calls again, or promising things he can’t do. I’m calling it “overeagerness.”
2. Hal isn’t truly autonomous just yet. He’s still operating on a set schedule for the most part.
3. UI design for the web front end is proving a bit trickier than I had thought. This is an area where I want to focus on: OpenClaw requires setup out of the box. This ships with a UI that works on any device, which feels a lot like Claude Desktop or ChatGPT. But getting elements to work has been a hassle.

Notable New Features

A lot of work this week ended up being in monitoring and security. I can honestly say our server is now prepared as much as we can for any AI-caused security hell on its way. Hal is actively monitoring for attacks using CleanTalk, and combined with CleanTalk, can block access to our site via that and Bunny.net, our CDN.

He’s also got monitoring for our deployments on Railway as well. It’s basic at the moment, but we’ll know of issues (and attacks) faster than ever before, and have the tools to diagnose and restart services if necessary.

Best of all? By next week, he’ll be connected to our Better Stack account, commenting on incidents with full summaries of his findings and any actions.

Something like this can easily run a company thousands of dollars a month: heck, for even the most basic premium functionality, Better Stack is $25/month, per user.

We’re also working on a feature to bring some more autonomy to Hal’s workday. Based on Strix’s Perch Time, Hal’s Heartbeat is a scheduled work period every two hours throughout the day. These are intelligently scheduled by Hal based on workload and the task context itself.

This Week’s Goals

My goal for the upcoming week is to finally squash the remaining data glitches that still remain. For some reason, Hal can pull tools on demand, but they’re not appearing in the morning email digest.

Another goal is to get Hal to use his heartbeat to work on a proposed action without me prompting him to. As it’s a new tool, I’m not expecting autonomous use just yet.