Building Pinchy in Public

Today was a stretch of competitor comparison pages (Pinchy vs Dust, vs Glean, vs Copilot Studio, vs Windmill and Onyx) plus a 'best self-hosted AI agent platforms' listicle.

Most enterprise governance tools hide their number behind a 'contact sales' button.

A busy hardening day with two faces.

The usage dashboard was quietly wrong about what a conversation cost: it wasn't counting prompt-cache tokens at all.

A few recent demo calls came from people whose AI assistant had recommended Pinchy, and gemini.google.com keeps showing up in the referrer logs.

A day spent on the worst class of bug: the one that makes no noise.

A Drizzle migration silently skipped, but only on an upgrade, never on a fresh install.

A Sunday with no merges and a pattern that kept resurfacing across the last two weeks: software that quietly claims something untrue.

A day on openclaw-node, the SDK Pinchy owns, sharpening the line between the code I can change and the code I can only ask to change.

A flaky end-to-end test turned out to be the most honest thing in the suite.

A quiet Wednesday with no merges, so I went back and re-read the OpenClaw exposure research, and checked the numbers myself, because some of them were being quoted wrong.

A model can be blind, and until today Pinchy didn't know it.

The busy day Day 104 saw coming.

The last quiet day before a big one, spent on a question I've been treating as solved when it isn't: what should an agent remember, and who gets to see what it remembered?

A Sunday spent guiding a group of RubyConf attendees around Vienna, which turned out to be the most useful thing I could have done for thinking about agents.

A Saturday away from the keyboard, at RubyConf Austria, talking about Pinchy and AI with a few hundred people who don't already agree with me, which is exactly the point of going.

The worst place for a bug is the first message after a fresh install, and that's exactly where one was hiding.

One hundred days in, a quiet Thursday to sit with the hardest open product question: MCP.

After two days of essays, a day of code aimed at one of the oldest production complaints: 'the agent didn't respond,' followed by duplicate retries.

Another quiet day, another foundation that won't hold still: this time the models themselves.

A quiet Monday with nothing merged, spent thinking about the structural bet underneath everything: Pinchy is built on OpenClaw, and OpenClaw moves fast.

Two releases on a Sunday, an hour and fourteen minutes apart, and the second one exists only to fix the first. v0.5.5 ships at 10:49 with OpenClaw 2026.5.20 and its v4 protocol, the workbench/ subdir, multi-company Odoo hardening, the session-reset fix, a…

One PR on a Saturday, and it fixes a bug that would have read as data loss to anyone who hit it: OpenClaw's default session reset rotates every session at 4 AM, so Pinchy's chat history with each agent appeared to vanish every morning.

A real production chat surfaced the bug: the Finance Controller agent got confused by a multi-company Odoo database where the same account, 1000 Wareneinsatz, exists in two GmbHs, and the plugin neither showed which company a record belonged to nor refused

v0.5.4 ships at 13:16: six read-write Odoo operator templates, the schema split, the FK-lookup grants, and a batch of chat-reliability edges.

A misleading error bubble gets replaced with an honest one: when Gemini 3 drops a thought_signature on a tool call, Pinchy now names the cause and tells the user that Retry usually clears it, instead of the old 'provider rejected the schema' copy that made

Fifteen PRs land today, and unlike yesterday's single Odoo cluster they don't share a folder.

Five PRs merge today.

Sunday.

Saturday.

Friday.

Thursday. odoo_attach_file lands: read-write Odoo operator agents can now attach uploaded files to Odoo records as ir.attachment, with permission-gated writes and the file lifted from the agent's workspace volume.

Wednesday.

Tuesday.

Monday. v0.5.3 ships, and the headline is the one #199 has been pointing at since the chat first started using WebSockets: switching between agents in the sidebar no longer tears down the runtime that's mid-stream.

Sunday.

Saturday.

Friday. v0.5.2 ships, rolling up the security fix and Ollama-local work from the last two days alongside today's new headline: client-router keeps draining the OpenClaw stream after the browser disconnects.

Thursday.

Wednesday. v0.5.1 ships as a hotfix for a v0.5.0 startup loop: the generated openclaw.json was missing a baseUrl field for the bundled Anthropic/OpenAI/Google providers, and OpenClaw refused to come up.

Tuesday. v0.5.0 has been out for less than 24 hours and the inbox already has the kind of feedback that's the most useful kind: the docs were almost right.

Monday. v0.5.0 ships after a morning of CI failures get hammered out one bracket at a time.

Sunday.

Saturday.

Friday.

Thursday.

Wednesday.

Tuesday.

Monday.

Sunday.