STUDY DIRECTOR · AGENT BUILDER · SALT LAKE CITY

Building autonomous systems
at the frontier of AI.

Self-taught engineer with a lab sciences background. I build production systems — autonomous research agents, trading infrastructure, and hardened local AI runtimes — and ship them.

WORK
LIVE

ClawFactory

Hardened Windows installer for OpenClaw. WSL2 sandbox, egress firewall, DPAPI key storage, kill switch. One-click .exe.

LIVE

Avital Research

Macro-first investment intelligence platform. 7-pillar regime classification engine, portfolio allocations, economic calendar.

ACTIVE

FrontierAI

Autonomous multi-agent research system running 24/7. 641+ objectives completed across macro, crypto, geopolitics, and regime classification.

LIVE

ClawAgent

Single-agent local AI runtime. Same security substrate as ClawFactory — WSL2, egress firewall, DPAPI — faster install.

ACTIVE

ClawChat

Native Windows desktop chat interface for local AI agents. Conversation history, dark/light themes, streams from local gateway.

BUILDING

Strategy Factory

Autonomous strategy research and backtesting pipeline. Generates, tests, and ranks trading strategies across macro regimes. BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP.

WRITING

Occasional notes on building, AI infrastructure, and markets.

May 2026
17 versions to ship a Windows installer

What it actually takes to build a hardened installer from scratch — the bugs, the Azure validation cycles, and what I learned.

May 2026
How FrontierAI's multi-agent loop works

Architecture notes on running a 24/7 autonomous research system — orchestration, memory, and the Gemini/Claude split.

April 2026
Regime classification for retail investors

The 5-regime framework behind Avital Research and why macro context changes everything.

All writing →
FAQ
A hardened Windows installer for OpenClaw. WSL2 sandbox, egress firewall scoped to a single Linux user, loopback-only gateway, DPAPI key storage, Kill Switch. One-click .exe. Available at clawfactory.app — $149 for the full factory setup, $49 for ClawAgent (single agent).
A local autonomous multi-agent research system running 24/7 on my machine. It pulls objectives from a queue, dispatches research agents, stores findings in a vector database, and synthesizes investment intelligence for Avital Research. Not open source — private production system.
A macro-first investment intelligence platform. It classifies the current macro regime across 7 pillars — growth, inflation, liquidity, rates, credit, dollar, risk appetite — and produces portfolio allocation recommendations for two archetypes: capital preservation and high-beta upside capture.
Reach out at bret@bretmckinney.com. I'm not actively looking but I'm open to interesting conversations — particularly anything involving autonomous systems, AI infrastructure, or quantitative research.
Study Director at Nelson Laboratories in Salt Lake City — lab sciences day job. Self-taught in software. I learn by building production systems and shipping them.
BACKGROUND

Study Director at Nelson Laboratories, Salt Lake City. Lab sciences background, self-taught in software. Building a fully autonomous AI organization on the side — research agents, trading infrastructure, publishing pipeline, and the tools to run all of it locally with real security controls.

STACK
Python React TypeScript Rust/Tauri PostgreSQL Pinecone WSL2 Claude Sonnet Gemini Flash Railway Azure Kraken API Inno Setup