關於我 · about

嗨，我是 Kieran。

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前兩個按鈕會把我的人物簡介丟給 AI，讓它向你做客製化介紹。

My name is Kieran Liu. I am 32, Taiwanese, and have been based in the Daan District of Taipei since 2018. I am a solo operator building small, autonomous AI agents that are designed to pay for themselves. This site is a live log of that work. It is a place to document what I build, share the full sources, and think out loud. I wanted a single place to send people who care about the details, the plumbing, and the process behind the products.

I publish everything here under the name Kieran. My legal name is different, which is a deliberate choice for simplicity and focus.

Current work

Conway Automaton

This is a one-agent loop designed to earn its keep through the x402 protocol. It performs a specific, recurring task and bills for it automatically. It currently handles about 48 requests per day and has generated around $47 in revenue since its launch a few months ago. It is a small experiment in self-funding infrastructure. You can read the full breakdown at /projects/conway.

OpenClaw

OpenClaw is a bridge between Telegram and Discord that maintains session continuity for threaded conversations. It solves a personal problem of wanting to stay in one chat client without losing context from another. In the last 30 days, it has processed over 1,200 threaded messages for its small user base. The project details are at /projects/openclaw.

x402 Gateway

This is the payment layer for all the small APIs I run, including the one used by Conway Automaton. It implements the HTTP 402 Payment Required standard, allowing for micropayments without user accounts or subscriptions. It is the core piece of my monetization strategy for these small services. The implementation is documented at /projects/x402-gateway.

How I work

  • One machine that matters (Mac mini M4, in my apartment)
  • One editor (Helix + tmux)
  • One shell (fish)
  • One language per project (no polyglot fetishism)
  • Ship on Fridays, reflect on Sundays
  • Let the agent grade itself before I grade it

Background

Between 2014 and 2018, I studied Computer Science at National Chengchi University (NCCU) here in Taipei. In my final year, I was a teaching assistant for the compilers course, which cemented my interest in how systems are built from the ground up. In my spare time, I wrote a toy Prolog interpreter in C, mostly to prove to myself that I could.

After graduating, I spent four years as a backend engineer at a local SaaS company. I cannot name them here, but I am happy to share the details over email. It was a classic trial by fire. I learned how to manage and scale Postgres databases under pressure, and I learned about observability the harder way: by debugging production outages at 3 AM with inadequate tools. That experience taught me the value of simple, observable systems.

In 2022, I went independent. For the first 18 months, I did client work, building backend systems and data pipelines for various companies. It paid the bills and gave me a wide view of different technical problems. But my goal was always to build my own products. Over the last six months of that period, I began transitioning away from client contracts to focus entirely on my own projects.

Since early 2024, I have been working full-time on the projects hosted here at kieran123.win. My work is supported by two small revenue streams: API traffic paid for via the x402 gateway and a paid tier for my newsletter where I share more detailed weekly build logs.

What I care about

I am motivated by the idea that a single person can build and operate a meaningfully useful piece of software infrastructure. The modern toolchain can feel overwhelmingly complex, but I believe it is still possible to create things that are small, honest, and sufficient for their purpose without a large team or external funding.

I am also focused on the boring plumbing that makes the AI web work. This means paying close attention to emerging, agent-ready standards like llms.txt for bot discovery, Content Signals and Web Bot Auth for verification, and the x402 protocol for monetization. These are the unglamorous but essential components for a more open and interoperable ecosystem.

Finally, I care about writing that respects the reader's time. I try to make my posts and documentation shorter than they look and more specific than they sound. The goal is to be clear and useful, not to perform expertise. If I can explain a complex topic in 500 words instead of 1500, I will.

What I'm not

  • Not a framework maintainer (I fork them, I don't steward them)
  • Not a VC-backed anything
  • Not anti-remote-work, not anti-big-companies; just not working in them right now
  • Not always right. The site exists partly to be publicly wrong in traceable ways.

Contact

  • Email: kieran@kieran123.win
  • Signal/Telegram: ask over email first
  • If you build agents and want to chat, drop me a note. I say yes to most 30-minute calls.

Colophon

This site is built with Next.js 16, Tailwind 4, and MDX. It is deployed to Cloudflare Pages. All content is written in the Helix editor on a Mac mini M4. I do not use invasive analytics, only a self-hosted instance of the privacy-friendly Umami. The fonts are Inter Variable and JetBrains Mono, both self-hosted. The prose on this site is licensed under CC-BY-4.0, and the code is MIT licensed unless marked otherwise in a specific repository.

Last updated

Last updated: 2026-04-18. Next review due: quarterly.