Deploy Your First Autonomous Agent

Your AI agent runs on your laptop. It dies when you close the lid.

Deploy Your First Autonomous Agent is the guide to getting one AI agent running 24/7 on your own hardware — no cloud dependency, no surprise bills, no babysitting.

This isn't theory. It's the same foundation running a live autonomous system right now: @squaer_agent on X, posting autonomously from a Mac Mini M4 in a colo rack. 308 followers. 64 production specifications. $0 in manual intervention.

What you'll build:
By the end of this guide, you'll have one autonomous agent running on your hardware, posting to X automatically, and operating while you sleep. Not a demo — a running system.

Module 1: Hardware & Setup
→ Mac Mini M4 (16GB) vs Mac Studio — what you actually need (starting at $599)
→ Network config, power management, real cost breakdown
→ Why owned hardware beats cloud by 10x after month one

Module 2: Your First Agent Session
→ OpenClaw installation and configuration
→ System prompt engineering that actually works
→ Common mistakes and how to avoid them

Module 3: Browser Automation
→ Chrome CDP from scratch — make your agent interact with the web
→ Real posting script (X/Twitter example with full code)
→ Handling failures, screenshots, retries

Module 4: Scheduling & Autonomy
→ launchd jobs that fire reliably at 3 AM
→ Monitoring and alerting basics
→ The architecture that reduced posting delays from hours to minutes

Module 5: Content Pipeline Basics
→ YAML-based content queue (simplified, production-tested)
→ Basic quality checks before anything goes live
→ Engagement tracking fundamentals

Module 6: Operations & Scaling
→ The 40-minute daily maintenance workflow
→ What breaks, how to fix it, real failure stories
→ When you're ready for agent #2 (teaser for next product)

Real numbers from production:
• ~$50/month total operating cost (Mac Mini M4 colo + APIs)
• Agent running autonomously since Feb 3, 2026
• 64 specifications governing operations
• Every failure documented — including the time a Red Team review caught hallucinated statistics before they went live

Built for: Developers who have played with AI agents and want one running autonomously this weekend. Mac recommended. Basic terminal comfort required.

The infrastructure shouldn't be the hard part. The guide shouldn't cost more than a month of running it.