I got tired of AI agents that just talk in circles, so I'm building a free open-source one. Here's what I've learned so far.

Hey everyone, I've been lurking here for a while and seen a lot of frustration about AI agents that overpromise and underdeliver. I felt the same way, so I started building Binary AI as a free, open-source alternative. What it is: A lightweight autonomous agent. No paywalls, no rate limits (at least for now). The goal was to make something that just works without needing a PhD to set up. What I've learned so far (the hard parts): Rate limiting is the silent killer. Early versions kept getting stuck because of API limits. Had to build in a retry/backoff system that doesn't just hammer the endpoint. "Autonomous" is a spectrum. Users expect it to magically do everything. I had to narrow the scope to specific tasks so it doesn't confidently fail at edge cases. Free is hard to sustain. I'm eating the inference costs right now. Figuring out how to keep it free while not going broke is the current challenge. What's next: I'm looking for a few people to try it out and tell me where it breaks. I'm not looking for praise—I need honest feedback on where it fails. If you want to check it out, I'll drop the link in the comments (per sub rules). Happy to answer any questions about the build process.