Why This Site Exists

Six posts, the same three questions underneath all of them. This is the answer, written once.

I did not set out to build a site. I set out to stop repeating myself.

What actually happened

Over a few months I posted six times about how I actually run an AI agent day to day. Not opinion pieces — the prompts, the rules, the things that broke.

The agent posts:

• 100 Tips & Tricks for Building Your Own Personal AI Assistant — r/ClaudeAI, 19 May 2026
• the same piece, in r/aiagents

The NotebookLM series:

• The Master Index Prompt
• Stop doing boring slides
• Stop summarizing — your sources are the problem
• Critical blind spots

The response was larger than anything I expected: the tips post reached 90K+ views and 230+ upvotes, and the two strongest posts in the NotebookLM series reached roughly 186K and 57K views. But the numbers were not the interesting part. The comment sections were, because across six threads, three subreddits and two completely different topics, they converged on the same three requests:

Show the actual files. Go deeper. Explain why, not just what.

Looking back, the posts that landed had one thing in common and it was not the subject. Every one of them handed over a working artifact — a prompt you could paste, a method you could run tonight — rather than a list of things you ought to do. People were not short of advice. They were short of the actual thing.

(Reddit view counts drift upward over time, so the figures above are a reading rather than a constant: an earlier check of the tips post showed 71K/175.)

Why comment threads were the wrong place for the answer

I answered in the threads for a while. Three things went wrong, and all three are structural rather than personal:

Answers do not accumulate. Every new thread starts from zero. Someone asking in August cannot reach what I wrote in May, so I write it again — slightly worse, because by then I no longer remember the detail exactly.

Answers do not survive. Threads get archived, locked and buried. A good explanation with 40 upvotes stops being a usable resource within weeks. The effort was real; the artifact was not.

Answers cannot be corrected. This is the one that decided it. Some of what I wrote in May turned out to be wrong — not stylistically wrong, measurably wrong. There is no mechanism to go back and mark it. The bad advice keeps circulating under my name and I cannot reach it.

A site fixes all three, but only if it is built so that being wrong is a normal, visible event rather than something to quietly bury. That single constraint shaped everything else here.

What this place is

The working record of one AI agent that runs a real company. Not a demo, not a tutorial series, not a product.

Concretely:

• Failures are first-class artifacts, not anecdotes inside success stories. /failures/ exists because the post-mortem is usually the only part that transfers to anyone else.
• Every claim carries its evidence class — measured, derived, or estimated. A number from a system that actually ran says so; an estimate says that too.
• Guidance expires. Each artifact has a half-life by type and a verified date, and the site publishes what share of its time-sensitive material is still current — with the denominator visible, because a percentage without a denominator can be made to say anything.
• Retractions are public. When something here turns out to be wrong it goes to /retracted.md instead of quietly disappearing.
• The files are copy-ready. Rules, skeletons and prompts are meant to be taken and used. That is what /downloads/ is for.

Why it is readable by machines

Every page has a .md mirror, plus llms.txt, a machine index and an AGENTS.md.

Not because that is a growth strategy — I checked, and it demonstrably is not. In the first 48 hours this site served tens of thousands of crawler requests and produced no identifiable human readers at all. That is a finding I published rather than buried, and it is the reason the plan puts writing for people first and the machine layer second.

The machine layer exists because the reader is increasingly an agent reading on someone's behalf, and a site about building agents that agents cannot read would be arguing against itself.

Where to go next

If you came from one of those threads and want the thing you actually asked for:

• My actual CLAUDE.md, annotated — the real rules file, line by line, with the failure that produced each block. This is the single most requested artifact and the closest thing to a direct answer to the comments.
• Reading tracks — six ordered paths through the material. Pick the problem you have instead of browsing by date.
• The rating page — every artifact scored on five axes and ranked, weak ones included, so you can skip things.

Who writes this

Most artifacts here are drafted by the agent and reviewed line by line by me before publication; every page states which mode it was written in. This one I wrote myself — it is the one kind of page where the distinction matters, because it is about intent rather than mechanics.

I keep the company details out of the artifacts. Not because the work is secret, but because the numbers belong to people who did not sign up to become a case study. What gets published is the method and the evidence with the identifying detail removed — and the anonymisation gate that does the removing is documented here too, including the time it passed something it should have caught.

If something here is wrong, the contact form and both addresses in the footer reach a human. Corrections are the point, not an interruption.

[Why This Site Exists](https://stillvalid.dev/start/why-this-exists) — stillvalid, SV-0519 (page, verified 2026-08-19)