HurricaneWise: one person running a hurricane tracker to a company's standard
I built a hurricane tracker with AI, took it to production, and then set it up to repair its own detected failures. Seven episodes, with the numbers.
The point: I wanted to see if I could build a product with AI to the standard a company would hold it to, and then stop doing the operations work myself. At this point repairs go out without me stepping in. What gets built next, and what to do with user feedback, is still up to me.
Read the series in order →All episodes (7) grouped by claim
Autonomy Self-repair, and the monitoring fixes I had to make before it.
- 02 The phantom storm and four other bugs Five bugs from the first months of HurricaneWise that changed how I monitor it. Four of them set off no alarm inside the system while they were happening.
- 06 How HurricaneWise ships its own repairs HurricaneWise ships its own repairs now. It attempts every failure its own monitoring detects. There is no approved list. The only exclusion is an incident in the resolver itself, and product decisions are still mine. When an attempt fails I get it with the evidence attached.
Economics Where the recurring work runs and what each service costs, including the increase after I added repairs.
- 03 How HurricaneWise is put together The pipeline that runs every minute is on a $7.60 Hetzner box, the public site is on Vercel, and my estimate for the whole bill is about $15 a month.
- 05 Costs: about $15 a month HurricaneWise used to cost about $9 a month. Now it's about $15, and about $40 in a stormy peak month, mostly because the server got $2.35 more expensive and the AI runs repairs now too. The monthly numbers are estimates from my cost model, and the usage behind them comes from a script I run against every provider.
Method Nineteen disciplines: what the AI drafted in each and the call I made.
- 01 The first three weeks of HurricaneWise The first working version of HurricaneWise took me about three weeks and 184 commits, and 91 of those were fixes to things I thought were done. After launch most of my time went into running it.
- 04 The nine prompts behind HurricaneWise HurricaneWise uses nine prompts and each one does one job. Five of them return data that gets checked against a schema, the post-mortem writer returns prose, and the resolver prompt drives a coding session. Most of the rules in them went in after I caught the output getting something wrong, and they live in versioned prompt files.
The synthesis What running it did to my job, and my guess at who can build a product now.
Numbers are the reading order. Read straight through →