This series opened with an AI agent wiping all my servers and me, briefly, wanting to walk away from IT for good. Several posts later I run more agents, with more freedom, than I did before any of it went wrong.
That still surprises me. So let me say plainly what actually changed, because it wasn’t the hardware.
The servers were never the point
I rebuilt the infrastructure twice. Hardware is replaceable — and mine kept proving it. If this series had been about servers, it would have been a dull one: a thing broke, I bought another thing, I plugged it in.
What actually got rebuilt was how I think about working with a machine that can act on its own. That part doesn’t fit on a shelf, and it’s the only part worth writing down.
What I’m keeping
A handful of convictions came out of it that I now hold harder than I did before:
- The information you give a system matters more than the rules you wrap around it. Most “AI is unreliable” problems are really “I described the world badly” problems.
- Freedom and safety aren’t opposites. You get both by drawing the blast radius first, then letting go inside it.
- The boring layers are the ones that save you. Not the clever new system — the old cron job, the decade of documentation, the backup nobody bragged about.
- A partner is something you design, not something you buy.
None of those are products. They’re ways of thinking, and they cost nothing to take with you.
What I actually do
I build things for a living — software, infrastructure, the occasional agent whose only job is to listen. But the thing underneath all of it, the thing this whole disaster clarified for me, is older and simpler: I like understanding a problem all the way to the bottom, and then making it smaller. Optimising. Tightening. Removing the part that never needed to be there.
That’s what I have, and it’s what I wanted this series to be — not a pitch, not a funnel. Just the knowledge, told honestly, including the parts where I nearly gave up.
If any of it was useful to you, that was the entire point.
Part of The 2026 Rebuild.