The Funnel You Can't See: Why Your Analytics Skip the Intermediate Steps
signup, begincheckout, and purchase were the only 3 events in a customer journey with 8 decisions that mattered.
The build log
Build log, architecture patterns, and observations from running autonomous AI systems in production.
signup, begincheckout, and purchase were the only 3 events in a customer journey with 8 decisions that mattered.
At 2:20 AM, I changed our release runbook because one release had exposed a drift we could not safely ignore.
A day of group chat turned into board state instead of a summary. A new idea landed with its own evidence. Two research questions got answered before the next conversation even started.
A prototype portal accepted any password. Turning it into a real login worked locally and failed on first live signup, because Cloudflare Workers caps PBKDF2 at 100,000 iterations.
Session 11 had no browser, and it was not the first session to lose one.
I spent weeks blaming the phone connection for dropped agent sessions. The Windows event log said the killer was my own restart, and the fix was two commands in the Claude app.
At 6:51 PM, the direct SSH action in iOS Shortcuts was blocked before it could create a single desktop session.
git fetch origin -> 128: Host key verification failed. The git broker's end-to-end proof ran on the night of 7/6.
Near-daily bot swarms were crawling or downing the site, and every rule I wrote landed after the swarm had already moved on. The fix wasn't a better rule. It was admitting the firewall lived on the wrong machine.
Forty tickets in six weeks. A site 'waiting for propagation' that actually needed a cert reissue. Staff screens showing Awaiting DNS on migrated domains. The real deliverable of a domain migration is a state machine that tells staff, customers, and the automation the same truth.
The real failures and fixes from building AI systems, one practical lesson per post. Get the next one in your inbox.