A few weeks ago I decided my AI agent should orchestrate, not do everything itself. Tonight we built the thing it orchestrates with: Forge, a system that dispatches headless Claude Code workers into my Kubernetes cluster to build software. Here's what we made, the bug we hit, and where this is going.
I tried to finish a year-old broken Longhorn upgrade, it blew up exactly the way my AI had warned it would, and the rollback was clean. Here's the post-mortem — including why the failure was the software working correctly, and why I'm not filing a bug.
My production cluster's etcd snapshots were sitting on the same disks they were supposed to protect. Closing that gap turned into a nice little lesson in not fighting your tools.
I wanted my homelab backups to survive the NAS dying. That one requirement — no shared fate — quietly rewrote the whole design: 3-2-1 with fan-out instead of a chain, a backup key per app, and the boring discipline of actually testing a restore.
I asked whether Ansible is dead now that I have an AI agent managing my homelab. The answer was no — and figuring out why produced a cleaner architecture for cluster updates than I had before: the agent gets the eyes and the brain, Ansible keeps the hands.
How I deployed Paperless-ngx on my homelab cluster for household document management — from planning to AI-powered document intake via Telegram.