I Self-Hosted an AI Assistant: Lessons from 48 Hours of Debugging

I Self-Hosted an AI Assistant: Lessons from 48 Hours of Debugging I wanted a local AI assistant. Expected: 2 hours. Reality: 2 days of edge cases, broken dependencies, and discovering that "local" doesn't mean "free." The Stack OpenClaw (open-source AI assistant framework) VPS with limited console access (had to file tickets to enable) OpenRouter for model access Local Qwen as fallback What Broke 1. Dependency Hell Pre-installed OpenClaw came with an outdated library. Updated manually. Then updated again. OpenRouter integration only worked after the second update. 2.