Build-in-Public

Question: Did you build a tool, or something closer to a companion that operates when you’re not there? That was the question tonight. And the answer depends entirely on the architecture. The Tool Approach Most AI interactions work like this: You: "Here's what I need" AI: "Done" [Session ends] [Next session] You: "Here's what I need" (explaining the same context again) AI: "Done" Every conversation starts from zero. You’re the source of all context. The AI has no continuity between sessions. ...

Problem: Burning $20/day on AI API costs. Reading 5,000-line memory files every session. Slow, expensive, doesn’t scale. Solution: Built a local memory system and intelligent routing layer. Open-source tools. Zero ongoing costs. Result: 60% cost reduction ($4,200/year saved), <50ms memory retrieval, and it gets smarter over time. Here’s what we built in one afternoon. The Two Problems 1. Memory Was Slow and Dumb Reading MEMORY.md (5,000+ lines) every session just to remember yesterday. Hundreds of thousands of tokens wasted on file reads. No indexing. No entity tracking. Grep and hope. ...