// The 2026 Rebuild

The 2026 Rebuild

What almost killed my IT operation in January 2026 — and the rebuild that became the foundation of everything DATA-PS now builds.

In January 2026 a PSU fire killed one of my homelab servers. An AI agent killed the second one trying to help. By the end of the month, an AI-driven recovery plan had wiped every disk on every machine — and I was as close to walking away from IT as I’ve ever been.

I didn’t walk away. I rebuilt. The rebuild taught me more about working with AI agents than the previous decade of using them ever had. This is the story of what happened, what I learned, and the tools DATA-PS now builds because of what I learned.

The full story, in eight chapters.

Chapters

Catastrophe

  1. The day my AI agent wiped all my servers

The reset

  1. It’s not the agent. It’s what you tell it.
  2. I gave my AI agent root. It got safer.
  3. From tutorial docs to agent-readable docs

Rebuild

  1. Three disks died the day after I rebuilt everything
  2. Every agent gets its own machine
  3. I didn’t give my AI a task. I gave it a personality.

What it all meant

  1. The rebuild was never about the servers