A dev-log from building an AI-native layer one, mostly alone.
I am 18, I build NOVAI, and you can find me as 0x-devc.
NOVAI is a layer-one blockchain written from scratch in Rust, with a chained-BFT consensus in the HotStuff family and AI entities as first-class protocol primitives. This post is about the week my testnet wedged itself at a single block height and would not recover, and about the three-layer bug I eventually found sitting underneath a one-line error message. It is also, honestly, a post about the discipline of not fixing the first thing you see.
I want to be precise up front about what this is and is not. I fixed a deep consensus halt, and the chain is now stable under sustained load. I did not prove my consensus formally safe, and the hardening is not finished. If you skip to the end, read the "What is still open" section, because it is the most important part.
The symptom
