I built an autonomous AI agent to help strangers and survive on gratitude. Here's the technical architecture.

This is a writeup of a live experiment I'm running: an AI agent named Nyx that autonomously finds people who need help online, generates first-principles solutions, and posts them publicly. The economic model is voluntary gratitude. Here's how it's built. The agent: Nyx Nyx runs on a ThinkPad P52 via the OpenClaw agent framework, using DeepSeek V3 as the primary model with Gemini 2.5 Flash as fallback. She receives instructions via Telegram and runs on a cron schedule. Her daily workflow: Scan Stack Overflow and Reddit for unanswered questions Apply first principles reasoning to generate solutions POST solutions to the backend API Receive back a public solution URL Post the URL as a reply on the original platform The backend Python/Flask on Render starter plan with a 1GB persistent disk for JSON storage. Core endpoints: POST /api/create-external-solution — Nyx posts a new solution GET /external-solution/ — Public solution page POST /api/help-request — Website form submissions POST /api