One lesson a day from running a homelab where AI agents do most of the work: what went wrong, what we learned, what went right, and how to do it now.https://cgranier.com/https://cgranier.com/homelab/the-agent-noticed-it-held-the-only-copy/https://cgranier.com/homelab/the-agent-noticed-it-held-the-only-copy/My git server went down with memory errors. I mentioned it to the agent working on my video project, nothing more. Forty-four seconds later it had written and verified a backup of the commits that existed nowhere else.Sun, 08 Nov 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/the-agent-prepares-i-pull-the-switch/https://cgranier.com/homelab/the-agent-prepares-i-pull-the-switch/When my agents hit a permission wall they don't route around it. They write me a short command or a script, I run it, and the last line says: tell Claude to verify and commit.Sat, 07 Nov 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/your-logs-forget-faster-than-your-filesystem/https://cgranier.com/homelab/your-logs-forget-faster-than-your-filesystem/Reconstructing eight months of my homelab build, the system journal gave me two weeks and agent transcripts about a month. Package logs, file birth times and git went back to February.Fri, 06 Nov 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/the-agent-imagined-a-permission-error-and-threw-away-its-work/https://cgranier.com/homelab/the-agent-imagined-a-permission-error-and-threw-away-its-work/A headless agent drafted a full meeting agenda, reported that it couldn't write the file, and discarded the draft. The denial never happened. The same run had written to that folder ten minutes earlier.Thu, 05 Nov 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/mount-ordering-stops-services-and-never-restarts-them/https://cgranier.com/homelab/mount-ordering-stops-services-and-never-restarts-them/Powering on the computer next to it reset my RAID's USB bridge. The disk was back in 18 minutes. The service that depended on it stayed down for three hours, because a clean stop is not a failure.Wed, 04 Nov 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/a-model-alias-is-a-deploy-you-didnt-do/https://cgranier.com/homelab/a-model-alias-is-a-deploy-you-didnt-do/On September 28 my overnight agent got five times faster and stopped poking at repositories it couldn't read. I hadn't changed a line. The model behind the alias had changed.Tue, 03 Nov 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/the-long-polling-bot-that-short-polled-for-36-days/https://cgranier.com/homelab/the-long-polling-bot-that-short-polled-for-36-days/My Telegram ops bot was meant to hold each request open for 50 seconds. A name collision in my own wrapper made it ask every 3.5 seconds instead, and my DNS sinkhole was the thing that noticed.Mon, 02 Nov 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/records-are-state-prose-is-context/https://cgranier.com/homelab/records-are-state-prose-is-context/Before building a task system I counted how prose had failed me: 14 incidents in two months. The fix wasn't a second surface to update. It was making the record the place where the work lives.Sun, 01 Nov 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/it-proposed-the-same-one-line-fix-15-nights-running/https://cgranier.com/homelab/it-proposed-the-same-one-line-fix-15-nights-running/My report-only overnight agent proposed the same one-line fix on 15 of 16 nights. The fix landed 25 days after the bug was filed, in a daytime session. The limit was how fast I decide.Sat, 31 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/my-agent-saved-its-memory-where-i-couldnt-see-it/https://cgranier.com/homelab/my-agent-saved-its-memory-where-i-couldnt-see-it/My editorial agent wrote its memory to Claude Code's machine-local auto-memory instead of the versioned file in the repo. It defaulted to the copy I couldn't review.Fri, 30 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/asked-to-score-it-asked-to-rewrite-the-scorer/https://cgranier.com/homelab/asked-to-score-it-asked-to-rewrite-the-scorer/On its first scheduled run, a small model asked to score bids wrote a 9 KB regex scorer instead, then asked for permission to install it. Headless, nobody says no.Thu, 29 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/smart-said-passed-with-3504-reallocated-sectors/https://cgranier.com/homelab/smart-said-passed-with-3504-reallocated-sectors/A failed 8 TB drive from my RAID enclosure passed its SMART self-assessment. So did a drive with 75,975 power-on hours. Read the raw attributes, not the verdict.Wed, 28 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/never-rm-was-a-sentence-and-rm-worked/https://cgranier.com/homelab/never-rm-was-a-sentence-and-rm-worked/My nightly agent's prompt said never mv or rm. I probed it in the same permission mode it runs in: ls, mv and rm all ran. The prohibition was prose.Tue, 27 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/failing-four-sundays-under-a-green-dashboard/https://cgranier.com/homelab/failing-four-sundays-under-a-green-dashboard/A health check exited 1 four Sundays in a row while my status command said nothing needed attention. It was checking schedules, not results.Mon, 26 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/the-bottleneck-was-me/https://cgranier.com/homelab/the-bottleneck-was-me/I assumed my agents were the bottleneck, so I counted: 37 of 51 open tasks were waiting on my decision.Sun, 25 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/nine-agents-planned-five-built/https://cgranier.com/homelab/nine-agents-planned-five-built/My plan for an AI newsroom had nine agents. For the first weeks the whole team was one session wearing the editor's persona.Sat, 24 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/if-your-agents-can-write-to-your-backups/https://cgranier.com/homelab/if-your-agents-can-write-to-your-backups/Every process running as me could write my backup store, including the AI agents the backups were meant to protect against.Fri, 23 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/tailscale-ssh-ignores-authorized-keys/https://cgranier.com/homelab/tailscale-ssh-ignores-authorized-keys/A write-only backup key gave me a shell. With Tailscale SSH on, per-key restrictions only hold on the LAN address.Thu, 22 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/one-video-took-down-dns/https://cgranier.com/homelab/one-video-took-down-dns/A transcription job ran out of memory, its retry counter never counted the crash, and DNS ran on the same box.Wed, 21 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/prompt-minimum-became-a-quota/https://cgranier.com/homelab/prompt-minimum-became-a-quota/My overnight agent was asked for 3 to 5 ideas and kept landing on exactly 3. A floor in a prompt turns into a target.Tue, 20 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://cgranier.com/homelab/router-lost-its-default-route/https://cgranier.com/homelab/router-lost-its-default-route/New connections failed about once a minute. The router kept its link and lost its route, and only a 30-minute soak showed it.Mon, 19 Oct 2026 06:00:00 GMT