I wanted to build Jarvis on day one. That was the real mistake, and it cost me about three months.

I've been building my own AI agent since October. If I'm honest, my original fantasy was Jarvis from Iron Man. One agent that ran my whole life. Handled the business, wrote the blog, managed the calendar, triaged the inbox. The whole thing. From day one.

That fantasy cost me about three months.

Some of the specific things it made me do wrong:

- I added five features at once when I should've added one and let it settle
- I let self-improvement rewrite my core instructions with no guardrails, and the agent drifted in five directions at once
- I built for full autonomy before the basics were stable, then had to roll most of it back
- I ran the strongest model on every tiny query until I hit usage limits before lunch
- I put an LLM call in every step of every pipeline when most of that plumbing should've just been plain scripts

The version I have now is the one I should've been building from the start: incremental. One small task. Then the next. Then the next. The big thing I originally wanted did emerge eventually, but as a side effect of a hundred small working pieces, not as a top-down design.

I think the biggest shift in my head was from "I want an agent that solves everything" to "I want a partner that takes the boring work off my desk and brings me the interesting decisions." That reframe unlocked most of the progress.

If anyone else is in the early pushing-too-hard phase, I'm happy to answer questions about what actually worked and what didn't.