From one agent to a team: what I learned about building AI agents at home

I have spent the last seven weeks grinding on building an AI agent platform in my home lab and the main thing it taught me is large agents with a large tool kit is the wrong design. A team of narrow, purpose-built agents, each with a small toolset and

I Told Two AIs to Build Me a Home Assistant Security Tool, Then Made Them Argue About It

There's a scene from The Big Bang Theory where the whole gang is crammed into Leonard and Sheldon's apartment, buzzing because somebody on the other side of the planet just flipped a lightbulb on and off from their computer. I'll give them the part

I Fixed My Alarm's Worst Feature With Somebody Else's Garbage

The Problem: Teenagers, Vacations, and the Smartphone Hassle My wife and I were heading out of state on vacation, leaving our teenage kids at home. I wanted the house locked down with a full security system, but I knew exactly what would happen if the controls only lived on a

GitLab CE in the Homelab: From Zero to GitOps

Posted to simplyoverengineered.com It started with a Docker update. I had one machine, my Unraid NAS TheIronArmada, running a stack of containers. Media server, some automation tools, a few other things. Life was good. Then I clicked the update button on one of them, something broke in a way

It's Always DNS, So I Made Sure It Never Goes Down

I have a confession. For years, I've been running my home network's DNS on a single Docker container sitting on TheIronArmada (my Unraid server with 12 spinning disks) (yes, that's where the name comes from). Every time I needed to pull a drive for

Building a Local-First Water Leak Detection System

The Problem: Four Basement Disasters I Didn't Know Were Happening My house was built sometime in the early 1900s. Best guess is between 1910 and 1920, but no one knows for sure. It's been remodeled, expanded, and "improved" over the decades, and I'

The Poisoned Well of Smart Home Automation

I see it all the time on LinkedIn. Security people, software engineers, DevOps guys (people who understand tech better than anyone) all posting the same take: "I'll never put a smart device in my house." And honestly? I get it. The security is garbage. The privacy

I Asked ChatGPT How to Use ChatGPT Better. It Worked

I hate studying endless documents for the sake of studying. When it's just reading with no hands-on work, I can only go for so long before my brain checks out. Give me a problem to solve or something to build, and I'll stay engaged for

Fixing My Furnace With ChatGPT (A DIY Knowledge Bridge Story)

It was Saturday afternoon. I walked out of my office and headed upstairs and immediately thought "man, it's way colder up here than it should be." I hadn't noticed from my office because I run an electric heater to keep it fairly warm while

How I Used AI to Take the Chaos Out of Dinner Part 2

Part 2 – Under the Hood: How the Meal Prep Engine Actually Works Now for the gears and wires. Underneath the story, the Meal Prep Engine is basically: 1. A set of rulebooks (MealPrepInstructions.md and MealHistory.md, ). 2. A structured conversation flow with a review step. 3. A simple HTML

How I Used AI to Take the Chaos Out of Dinner Part 1

Part 1 – Slightly Overengineered Meals: How a Simple Prompt Snowballed Into a Family System For a long time, dinner at my house followed a familiar pattern: * No plan. * Everyone’s hungry. * We make the easiest thing in sight. * Leftovers die in the fridge. I was trying to lose weight. The