Obi Jam

Building Obi — a family-facing AI chief of staff running on a Mac Mini harness. Custom Node.js orchestrator, Discord transport, Claude API + Ollama, no framework. Real lessons from replacing a hosted agent platform with code you own.

12 articles

obi-jam fix beginner 5 minutes

Natural Language Date Parsing: The Same-Day Weekday Bug

When your reminder parser sees '~wed 10pm' on a Wednesday, it schedules next week instead of today. A one-character fix.

Mar 18, 2026 →

obi-jam fix beginner 15 minutes

Discord Markdown Gotchas for Bot Messages

Discord headings need blank lines before them, markdown links generate embed previews, and messages over 2000 chars get rejected silently.

Mar 18, 2026 →

obi-jam pattern intermediate

Self-Hosted Open Source as Agent Infrastructure

Run Vikunja and Google Calendar locally and your agent gets task management, scheduling, and reminders for $0/month — no SaaS, no vendor lock-in.

Mar 18, 2026 →

obi-jam pattern intermediate

Building a Morning Brief: Multi-Source Agent Briefings

How to build a daily agent briefing that pulls from Google Calendar and Vikunja, formats it for Discord, and posts at 6:30am automatically.

Mar 18, 2026 →

obi-jam debugging intermediate 15 minutes

Your Agent Is Hallucinating Answers Instead of Running Tools

When command routing fails silently, the LLM fills the gap with confident fabrications. The user never knows the tool didn't run.

Mar 15, 2026 →

obi-jam pattern beginner

Keep Your Agent Runtime Under 400 Lines

If you can't diagnose a problem in your agent runtime in 30 minutes, your codebase is too big. Simplicity is a reliability feature.

Mar 14, 2026 →

obi-jam pattern beginner

Conversation Memory Is Context Not History

Your agent doesn't need to remember every message. A sliding window of recent context beats an ever-growing archive.

Mar 14, 2026 →

obi-jam pattern intermediate

Claude for Thinking, Ollama for Doing

Route complex reasoning to Claude API and cheap tasks to local Ollama. Your agent doesn't need its best brain for every message.

Mar 14, 2026 →

obi-jam pattern intermediate

Make Your Agent Transport a Swappable Layer

Define a transport interface once. Discord today, iMessage tomorrow. Your orchestrator should never know which wire it's talking through.

Mar 14, 2026 →

obi-jam infrastructure beginner

Build Your Own Agent Harness: A Layer-by-Layer Primer

How to build an always-on AI agent runtime from scratch — transport, personality, LLM routing, skills, memory, and uptime — by validating one layer at a time.

Mar 14, 2026 →

obi-jam pattern intermediate

Separate the Harness from the Agent

Your agent runtime should know nothing about who it's running. Split machine from mind and every agent gets portable.

Mar 14, 2026 →

obi-jam infrastructure beginner

Your VPS Is Costing You More Than the Invoice

The real cost of a rented server isn't the monthly bill. It's the maintenance time that could go toward building the product.

Mar 14, 2026 →