Most AI agent demos are shaped like a 90-second loop: prompt → tool call → answer. The interesting failures don't show up there. They show up around day 7, when the process you started in a tmux session has eaten 4 GB of RAM, your browser sub-agent is wedged on a captcha you never noticed, and the thing has been retrying the same failed Stripe webhook for 36 hours. I ran a single OpenClaw agent on a small VPS for 30 days. It was scoped to one boring job: triage incoming sales emails, draft replies, file them in the right folder, ping Slack on anything weird. The agent ran continuously, scheduled by cron, with persistent state in SQLite. No multi-agent orchestration, no fancy memory layer — just one process trying to stay alive. Here is what actually broke, in the order it happened. Day 1–3: everything looks great The first three days are a honeymoon. Latency is good, the agent handles edge cases I didn't think to specify, and the inbox triage rules quietly improve as it picks up patterns.…