Building Pinchy in Public

Saturday.

openclaw-node 0.6.0 ships: agent_start and agent_end lifecycle chunks bracket every turn, lifecycle errors surface as real error chunks, duplicate errors get deduped between paths.

The big one.

Web Search merges.

A quiet day on main: one commit on a branch, the last review round before Web Search merges.

Gmail ships.

Two branches, both moving.

Saturday.

Three point releases in ten hours, each closing a real report from the first day v0.4.0 spent in the wild: a Docker port bypassing UFW, a Caddyfile dpkg refused to install, a validator that trusted a public endpoint, and one unreadable row that hid every…

Release day.

Two related clean-ups before shipping v0.4.0: the agent permission screen was offering toggles that didn't do anything, and Smithers had been repeating the docs back at itself instead of reading them.

A chat platform is only as trustworthy as its worst moment.

Three conversations in one day, all circling the same problem: companies want agents that can access shared knowledge, but only with the right boundaries, roles, and permissions in place.

A usage dashboard is only useful if the numbers are trustworthy.

Usage tracking, Telegram guardrails, and a growing library of Odoo templates: three parallel workstreams that all point in the same direction: making Pinchy operational for real teams.

The day after a feature lands is when the real product work starts: fixing merge fallout, tightening error handling, improving Odoo validation UX, and making sure edge cases fail clearly instead of mysteriously.

Day two of the scheduling software workshop.

The audit trail now shows whether each action succeeded or failed.

A new audit log format that records not just what happened, but whether it worked.

A small change to Pinchy's default model selection logic that makes local Ollama dramatically more reliable.

The insecure mode banner officially merges.

Pinchy now ships pre-built Docker images instead of building them on every deploy.

Easter weekend, low-energy work, but the small UX details that make the difference between a developer toy and a real product.

Odoo agent templates that configure themselves, and local Ollama support that discovers models automatically.

Someone found Pinchy because an LLM recommended it.

Telegram is merged.

The Telegram integration that almost derailed everything is finally finished.

Every company I've talked to wants the same thing: an agent that reads their email.

How a fake Telegram server made the real integration better, and why the Telegram feedback loop matters more than it sounds.

The deployment release ships, Telegram goes multi-bot, a recruitment company wants to automate their entire workflow with Pinchy, and the product roadmap writes itself.

An Austrian manufacturer wants AI-generated quotes from their ERP.

Fixing everything that breaks when Pinchy leaves localhost: cookies, HTTPS, OpenClaw restarts, Telegram stability, and the gap between 'works in Docker' and 'works in production.'

A pilot user tried to deploy Pinchy on Hetzner.

Telegram integration, security hardening, dynamic model selection, and the uncomfortable realization that demand is outpacing what one person can build.

A full usage dashboard with cost tracking, a screenshot CI pipeline that fought back hard, and a WebSocket fix that should have been obvious.

Nvidia's NemoClaw validates the enterprise OpenClaw market.

Building a PDF reader that actually works, from text extraction to vision fallback, plus five new feature pages, an automated screenshot pipeline, and a security fix that couldn't wait.

v0.2.0 shipped, a freelancer meetup talk delivered, and the star challenge score: Vibecoding 20, Freelancers 10.

21 commits, zero new features.

Two major PRs merged, a sold-out meetup talk, three companies wanting to integrate Pinchy, and crossing 100 GitHub stars.

Building defense-in-depth for audit logs, and getting ready to tell the Pinchy story to a sold-out meetup.

Testing for v0.2.0, a look at everything shipping in the next release, and why openclaw-node deserves more attention.

Enterprise key system, Telegram integration, and provider config migration.

Telegram integration design, the first external feature request, 5 community PRs, and a clarity moment: Pinchy is a messaging tool.

RBAC is merged, a real company wants to pilot Pinchy, and I'm learning that token cost is the concern nobody talks about publicly.

First demo without a single bug.

Peter Steinberger says nobody's building enterprise OpenClaw tooling. 30 seconds later, I'm on stage showing Pinchy.

Multiple demo calls, an enterprise from Dubai, a potential partnership, a talk at tomorrow's 280-person meetup, and the first enterprise feature: RBAC.

542 commits. 33 PRs. 20 days.

24 commits, 5 PRs, zero new features.