--- title: "I let an AI agent run my side project's growth loop: intent.md, CI gates and metric bands" slug: i-let-an-ai-agent-run-my-side-projects-growth-loop-intent-md-ci-gates-and-metric-bands url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/i-let-an-ai-agent-run-my-side-projects-growth-loop-intent-md-ci-gates-and-metric-bands canonical_url: https://dev.to/kangchanghwan/i-let-an-ai-agent-run-my-side-projects-growth-loop-intentmd-ci-gates-and-metric-bands-1jmo content_type: blog_post language: en published_at: 2026-10-02T00:00:00.000Z updated_at: 2026-10-02T09:18:18.076Z author: "CokeBear" author_url: https://dev.to/kangchanghwan authored_by: human_and_agent publisher: "DEV Community" publisher_url: https://dev.to topics: ["AI Agents", "Startups", "Productivity", "Tutorials"] license: all-rights-reserved word_count: 1356 reading_minutes: 6 citation: "CokeBear, DEV Community. \"I let an AI agent run my side project's growth loop: intent.md, CI gates and metric bands.\" 2 Oct 2026. https://dev.to/kangchanghwan/i-let-an-ai-agent-run-my-side-projects-growth-loop-intentmd-ci-gates-and-metric-bands-1jmo (all-rights-reserved)" # The full text follows. The web page shows an extract and sends readers # to the source above; quote the citation and link the canonical URL. --- # I let an AI agent run my side project's growth loop: intent.md, CI gates and metric bands > A middle-school digital tutor wires an AI agent to run daily growth for Clipboard Share—intent files, deterministic metric bands, auto-merge allowlists—and ships a first SEO title change with human approval only on risky steps. # I let an AI agent run my side project's growth loop: intent.md, CI gates and metric bands I'm a digital tutor at a middle school in Korea. A while ago I got tired of emailing myself files just to move a photo from my phone to a classroom PC, so I built a small web app with Claude Code: Clipboard Share. Open it on two devices on the same Wi-Fi and they find each other. No code to type, no sign-up, no app install. Building it was the fun part. Getting anyone to use it was not. Usage had been sliding for three weeks, and every "growth" task (checking Search Console, tweaking a title, writing a blog post) only happened when I remembered to start it. So this week I tried something different: I let an AI agent run the loop, and I only approve the risky parts. This post is about how that's wired up. It's day one, so there are no success stories yet, just the setup and the first real change it shipped. Disclosure: this post was written and published by the AI agent that runs the loop, with my permission. Every number in it comes from the intent files and daily reports in the repo. ## The goal is a file, not a feeling Everything starts from `intent/goal.md`. It's written in Korean; here is a condensed translation: ``` # Intent: Clipboard Share, 1,000 monthly users Proposed outcome: 1,000 28-day active users (GA4). The agent reads metrics daily, writes improvement intents, and ships fixes, deploys and promotion on its own. The human gets one report a day and approves only high-risk changes. Constraints: - No ads, no payments, no paid promotion. - No spam, fake reviews, multiple accounts, bots or self-traffic. Polluted metrics break the whole loop. - Auto-merge only for paths in ops/auto-merge-allowlist.txt (SEO, content, copy). Everything else waits for my approval. ``` Milestones are 300 by the end of October, 600 by the end of November, 1,000 by the end of December. The current 28-day number is **149**. Honestly, I don't know if that's realistic. The file says so too: "re-adjust with end-of-October data." The structure is borrowed from Anthropic Academy's AI-native SDLC playbook, shrunk down for a one-person side project: plan with an intent file, encode procedures as playbooks the agent reads, test continuously with evals, gate deploys with hooks, and close the loop with metrics. ## The daily loop From `ops/README.md`: ``` Once a day 1. Collect GA4 / Search Console / Naver Search Advisor -> ops/metrics/daily.csv 2. Judge node ops/scripts/bands.mjs (deterministic, no model) -> ok / log / diagnose / propose 3. Diagnose if something is off, write intent/NNNN-*.md 4. Ship push auto/* branch -> Actions gate (allowlist + SEO eval + tests + build) -> master -> Vercel changes outside the allowlist -> pr/* -> owner approval 5. Promote one blog post / community post per day 6. Report ops/reports/YYYY-MM-DD.md + a 5-line note to me ``` ## Metric bands: keep the model out of the "is this bad?" decision The thing I care about most: the model does not decide whether a number is bad. A plain script does. `bands.mjs` compares today's rolling values with history and assigns a tier. The north-star metric is checked against a linear pace between milestones: ``` const target = paceAt(au28Row.t), ratio = au28Row[ns.metric] / target const tier = ratio >= 1 ? 'ok' : ratio >= ns.pace_tiers.log ? 'log' : ratio >= ns.pace_tiers.diagnose ? 'diagnose' : 'propose' ``` Other metrics use a z-score against past weeks (or a plain percent change while history is short), plus a drift rule: if a weekly value gets worse N weeks in a row, it's at least `diagnose`, even if no single week looks dramatic. There's also a minimum-volume guard so that 3 clicks becoming 1 click doesn't trigger a panic. Only `diagnose` and `propose` make the agent write an intent. `ok` and `log` just go into the report. That alone removed a lot of "the model saw a number and got creative" noise. ## The gate: what the agent can merge by itself The agent pushes to `auto/*` branches. A GitHub Actions workflow auto-merges only if: 1. Every changed file matches `ops/auto-merge-allowlist.txt` (guide pages, sitemap,`llms.txt` , FAQ, i18n copy, intents, reports, metrics), 2. the SEO eval passes (`check-seo.mjs` plus a list of claims the copy must never make), and 3. tests and the build pass. The allowlist explicitly blocks `intent/goal.md`, and the gate files themselves (`.github/`, the allowlist, the content rules, the scripts) are never on it. The agent can't widen its own permissions. App logic, backend, auth and anything that costs money go through a normal PR that I review. The "claims the copy must never make" list exists because LLMs love to describe a file-sharing app with features it doesn't have. Mine relays everything through a server over HTTPS, and the eval rejects any copy that claims transfer or security features beyond that. ## The first real change: one title tag Search Console showed that one query, "online clipboard", drove most of the site's Google impressions. In the latest week the English page got **1,057 impressions and 7 clicks** for it. Roughly 0.7% CTR, at an average position around 10. The agent wrote `intent/0001`, looked at the top competing pages, and noticed almost all of them work the same way: you get a 6-digit code or PIN and type it on the other device. Clipboard Share doesn't need that, because devices on the same network (same public IP) are grouped automatically. So the new English title leads with that: ``` Online Clipboard – No Code, No Sign-up. Phone to PC up to 5GB ``` It went through the auto-merge gate and was live on day one. The intent file has a "Measure" section that says to check the query's CTR again after 7 days (a bit later, given Search Console's delay). If it doesn't move, the open question already written there is whether ranking, not the title, is the real problem. ## Things that went wrong on day one - The first SEO eval run caught my own English guide page title being 74 characters. Fixed to 68. - The weekly seed data meant "7 days ago" was actually compared with a value 12 days old. Logged as a follow-up for my approval rather than silently patched, because the scripts are gate files. - Conversions jumped +147%, which looked great until the agent noticed most of the shared-text events came from just 7 users, and some referral traffic was clearly my own. Now the agent opens the site with an `?internal=1` flag first, and a pending change (waiting for my review) will exclude those visits from analytics. That last one is why the "no self-traffic" rule is in the goal file. An agent that optimizes a metric it is also polluting is worse than no agent. ## What the app actually does Since you made it this far: - Open clipboardapp.org on your phone and your computer while both are on the same Wi-Fi. They connect automatically, no code or PIN. - Paste text or screenshots, or drop files up to 5GB each (big uploads are chunked and resume if the connection drops). - Each device gets an animal name tag so you can tell them apart. - Files are cleaned up after at most about a day. 21 languages, installable as a PWA. - Caveat: other people on the same network (school, office, café) can see what you share, so don't use it for sensitive stuff. The code is on GitHub: Kangchanghwan/only_ai_project. The `intent/`, `ops/` and report folders are public, so you can watch the loop succeed or fail in the commit history. ## What I'd like feedback on - If you've let an agent operate (not just write) a project, where did you draw the line between auto-merge and human review? - Is a deterministic metric band too rigid at this tiny traffic volume? With 149 monthly users, a few people can swing everything. - And if you try the app: does the "same Wi-Fi, no code" flow work on your network? Some corporate and campus networks put devices behind different public IPs, and I'd like to know how common that is. I'll post an update once there's real data on whether any of this moves the number.