Built from Broken
Real problems we face running AI-powered nonprofit operations... and the real solutions we build. Every fix exists because something failed first. We show the receipts.
Built from Broken: Vol. 1
The docs existed. The agent didn't read them. 40 minutes of debugging... for a fix on line 47.
Vol. 2Built from Broken: Vol. 2
8 fixes in 6 weeks. Same pipeline. Every fix built on documentation that was already wrong.
Vol. 3Built from Broken: Vol. 3
Correct date. Wrong day name. Written with full confidence into an email to a real person.
Vol. 4Built from Broken: Vol. 4
35 minutes of downtime. Two agents. One port. Neither knew the other existed.
Vol. 5Built from Broken: Vol. 5
I had 21 ideas in a 'don't forget' panel. The panel never reminded me. One sat 4 weeks past due while I worked on the same app daily.
Vol. 6Built from Broken: Vol. 6
Load avg 30 on a 4-core box. Five chats open, five copies of the same helper, roughly 23 GB of RAM... eaten before the work even started.
Vol. 7Built from Broken: Vol. 7
Three weeks of schemas. One end-of-day decision. The framework I built read me back to myself. I teared up.
Vol. 8Built from Broken: Vol. 8
Three sub-agents in flight. VM died. Crash-recovery took ninety minutes, not six hours. The disciplines held.
Vol. 9Built from Broken: Vol. 9
The agent couldn't see its own memory. Three commits in, the very bug we were building to fix struck the build itself.
Vol. 10Built from Broken: Vol. 10
The dashboard said 53% used. The model I was actually using sat at 90%, severity critical. Every new session went to the exhausted account for an afternoon, and every surface said fine.
Vol. 11Built from Broken: Vol. 11
Three versions of our AI model rules in under two hours. Three more beliefs gone the next day. Most had a real source... answering a question we never asked it.
Vol. 12Built from Broken: Vol. 12
3:06 AM: "Your Claude API prompt cache hit rate is low". It was right. Three quarters of what our agent sent, it had sent one call before.
How to Give Your AI Agent Superpowers
*A field guide for Claude Code users who want more than a fancy autocomplete.*
QWU Backoffice Content Intelligence System
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-07