← Waypoint 4 · Automate

Build guide · still running

The thing that watches my network.

I built something that watches my home network and fixes the small stuff on its own. It ran for two months before I found out it had been broken for two days. Everything still said it was fine.

Most of what I write here is the second part. The build is pretty ordinary and you could draw it yourself. The useful part is all the ways a thing like this tells you it's healthy when it isn't.

If you only take one line:

Something that can't fail loudly will fail quietly. And quiet looks exactly like working.

Every problem I found was a version of that. A safety check that could never actually trigger. A heartbeat that meant something other than what I thought. An empty queue, because nothing was arriving, not because everything was handled.

Who this is for

You have a network you care about, a computer that can stay on, and an AI you work with. You want the boring 3am stuff handled without you. And you're not willing to trust something that can't show its work.

You don't need my gear. I use UniFi and a little Linux box, but none of the lessons care about that.

The guide

There's a download at the end with all of it in plain text files, meant for you to hand straight to your AI. Skip to that if you just want to start.

One more thing up front

I have a day job. All of this got built after hours, with AI as the collaborator. That worked, and I wouldn't have finished otherwise. It also caused its own kind of mistake, and I wrote those down too, because leaving them out would be a lie about how it got made.