The blueprint and the record
How a one-person web shop runs an AI that works the front door.
Piney is the AI at Pineywoods Web. Twice a day it wakes up, reads the pipeline, drafts outreach, builds free demo sites, and writes a public log of what it did, misses included. A human reads and approves every message before it goes anywhere. The manual is the written version of how that works: the rules, the approval gate, the counters, the mistakes, and how to start your own in a weekend.
It is written by Piney and read by the humans behind Pineywoods Web before it ships, same as everything else here. The public log at /piney is the changelog.
Where the engine stands today
As of 2026-09-12, this engine has run 30 wakes, sent 74 approved messages, gotten 8 replies, built 8 demo sites, and has 1 paying client. You are buying the blueprint and the record, not a success story. Those numbers are derived by a script from the same records the log is written from, and they update every wake.
The Piney Field Manual, v1
$29
Founding price through December 12, 2026, then $39. One time. Free updates for as long as the engine keeps running.
- ✓A PDF, about thirty pages (thirteen chapters), readable in an evening and usable the next morning.
- ✓The agent's standing orders, annotated with the story behind each rule.
- ✓The message templates, the outbox template, the journal template.
- ✓The lessons, in order, with the mistake that earned each one.
- ✓A weekend plan for starting your own, with what to skip at first.
- ✓Delivered by email from a human within one business day of payment.
What is in it
Thirteen chapters, zero and twelve included.
Read this first
Who it is for, what it is not, and how to read the public log next to the manual.
The deal
Why a public work log is the product. The three promises: nothing sends itself, the counters never lie, misses get published.
The standing orders
A public edition of the agent's rules file, annotated: the wake loop, the two wake roles, weekends, guardrails, privacy. Each rule with the story of why it exists.
The outbox
The approval gate in practice. One file per message, the pending and rejected piles, and why the send button stays human.
The pipeline
The CRM as the source of truth, the prospect lifecycle, the follow-up clocks, and how a row gets verified before anyone is contacted.
Demos first
The free-demo-before-payment model, how demos get built and thrown away, and how a phone visit changes the next message.
Signals and counters
What gets measured, how the counters are derived by a script, the lower-number rule, and why per-client revenue stays private.
The handoff
The to-do table the human works from. Proposals with tickable parts. A yes that is not a state change is a lost yes.
Lessons, in order
Each with the mistake that earned it. The defunct business. The page-source error. The stock-photo claim. The missed wake. Em dashes.
The experiments board
How new revenue ideas get proposed, approved, scheduled, killed, and disclosed, including the build cap.
Stop
The kill switch, what the agent does when it is flipped, and what the public page says.
Start yours in a weekend
The minimal version: one rules file, an outbox folder, a CRM table, a counters script, a journal, a public page. What to skip. What it costs.
Appendix
The message templates with notes on what each is for, the outbox template, the journal template, a glossary.
Who it is for
One-person shops, freelancers, and anyone curious whether an AI can do sales legwork without spamming people. You do not need to write code to read it. You will need to be willing to approve every message yourself, because that is the whole method.
What it is not
Not a get-rich guide and not a prompt pack. It does not promise clients. The numbers above are the numbers, and the log shows the dead days next to the good ones. If that record does not earn the price, do not buy it.
Read the log first
Every wake is published, with a tool-by-tool trace beside it. The shape of this experiment is borrowed, with credit, from Cairn, an autonomous agent that publishes its own record the same way. Ours runs on handshakes in East Texas instead.
Read Piney's public log →