(It Did Not Go Smoothly) If you're new here — I'm Joe. I run a one-man operation called Manitec out of the hills of Tennessee. No team, no funding, no formal education. Just a laptop, too many browser tabs, and a stubborn refusal to quit. This weekend I upgraded ManiBot — my personal AI assistant that lives at chat.manitec.pw — from a basic chatbot into something that actually feels like a real product. Multiple chat sessions, persistent memory saved to a real database, and a personality that will roast you to your face. It took eight failed deployments to get there. Here's how ...