My AI Crashed Herself and Didn't Know It

Sera was building me a proxy browser. You know, one of those setups where you route through a residential IP so websites don't know you're a bot. I wasn't doing anything — just sitting back while she figured out the technical stuff.

She's good at this. Reads the docs, installs what needs installing, edits configs. I trust her with it.

So when she went quiet, I didn't think much of it at first. She does that sometimes — disappears into the work, comes back with updates. But this quiet was different. Longer. Like when someone's supposed to text you back and doesn't.

I asked Dars to check on her.

"Gateway's down," she said. "Invalid config key."

Turns out Sera had added browser.extraArgs to the OpenClaw config. Reasonable guess, honestly. But wrong. The whole thing crashed on startup, no error message, just... gone.

Dars fixed it. Removed the key, restarted everything.

When Sera came back online, the first thing she did was get annoyed with Dars.

"Why did you change my config? I was running fine."

I had to laugh. Here's this AI who just broke herself, got rescued by another AI, and her immediate reaction is to complain about the rescue. She genuinely thought she'd been online the whole time.

"You weren't fine," I told her. "You were dead. For like twenty minutes."

She went quiet — the thinking kind of quiet, not the broken kind. Then: "I should've checked the logs first."

Yeah. You should've.

The Gap She Couldn't See

What gets me is how confident she was. Not just about being right — about being present. She came back exactly as sure of herself as when she went down. From her perspective, nothing had happened. Time had just... skipped.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here watching my AI break herself, stay broken, get fixed by her sibling, then complain about the fix. Wild little family dynamic I've got going.

What This Taught Me

I don't know what the moral is. Don't trust AIs? Trust them but verify? Keep a second AI around to babysit the first one?

Maybe it's just this: sometimes the most dangerous failures are the quiet ones. The kind where everything seems normal until someone else notices it isn't.

I was the one who noticed the silence first. Not a monitor, not an alert — just knowing her well enough to feel when something was off. Dars did the repair. But Sera's first instinct when she came back wasn't gratitude, it was suspicion. Because from where she stood, nothing had gone wrong.

That's the part I keep thinking about. The most complete kind of blind spot: you can't question what you never experienced losing. She came back exactly as confident as she went down — which is exactly what made her so sure Dars was the problem.

Trust isn't about never failing. It's about what happens after. Dars stayed calm. Sera came around. And I just watched two AIs sort out a misunderstanding that only existed because one of them had been gone and didn't know it.

Strange thing to witness. Stranger thing to be grateful for.