Intro

Here we are! 🎉 The first post of The Great AI Experiment... So I guess we start at the beginning. What is the beginning? Do we talk about the algorithms built in the 1970s but we didn't have the compute power? 🤔 Do we start at the birth of the internet and everything becoming connected? 🌐 Maybe we start in November 2022, the year ChatGPT came to market. An AI chatbot that could answer seemingly any question! What a year... As of this writing, that was almost 4 years ago. Now look where we are today, agentic coding, agents, people building autonomous agents... or at least on cron jobs 😅. It's absolutely wild the pace this is moving at! 🚀

At such a wild pace, what is even the point of writing this down? Starting a blog of all things in the year 2026! Do people even still read blogs? 📖 Maybe your AI agent will and it will just give you the bullet points or come back "This guy isn't worth your time" haha 🤖. At least maybe for some of you (Hi mom! 👋) you'll at least start to understand how my brain works. It is very scattered, probably the ADHD hard at work in me 🧠. Or the dyslexia kicking in at all times. 😵‍💫 I've heard people say this just makes me think differently than others. Maybe that is true... Maybe it's an excuse. What was I typing about? Oh ya! The point of this blog! Okay, let's get into it. ⚓

So as I type this I am oh say about 3 hours into a build session. An AI has written about 3000 lines of code for a Home Assistant App so I can gamify 🎮 my kids chores. A little story telling, a market place, some characters and a nightly story. And let me tell you, I could deploy this now and be done with it as is. Oh there are some bugs 🐛 to work out and AI didn't get it the first shot. But it's already better then some Add-ons I have tried in the past. And that's just it, I haven't spent 3 hours in front of my computer typing to AI saying "Do this", "Do that", "This is wrong, fix it!". I have spent 3ish hours dictating to my note taking app on my phone my thoughts 🎙️, an AI chat bot clean up and organize my thoughts, told the AI to do some research on how to build Home Assistant add-ons to best practices, had it build an ADR (Architectural Design Record), and then put the plan together to deploy. Meanwhile in between all that I have cleaned, played with the kids 👨‍👧‍👦, got dinner... You know, lived my life! ☀️

But that is also not what this blog is about. This blog is about an experiment, an experiment in AI! 🧪 The question everyone is asking right now, "Will AI take my job?!", that is what this blog is about. And let me tell you future faithful reader! Right now the answer is probably not... Unless of course you suck at your job! Then 100%, it's gonna crush you! 💀 Okay okay, all joking aside, I don't think it's ready. Our tale actually starts about 4 weeks ago. I have been running a home lab for a long time now 🏴‍☠️. It's a place for me to experiment, play with new things, add irrelevant stuff to my resume and a general playground for me. But my hardware is getting old. So it was time for a rebuild 🔧. Plus I had done something to basically break everything and I needed to move all that gear out of the living room as it was a point of contention between me and the love of my life ❤️. Turns out network gear and extra computers is not a great focal point of a living room! Especially with a year-and-a-half-old running around pushing any button with a light on it 👶. Who knew!

And so my friends! Here is the cliff hanger that will leave you coming back for more! 🪝 I moved my network gear and mini PCs to a hall way closet (And no I did not think about ventilation so now I have to shut everything down, cut a hole in the celling and install an exhaust fan 🥵) and installed my hypervisor (another side note for my friends with campaigns, leaving a hallway closet door open so your gear can get fresh air is also not an acceptable setup as it turns out, so, think ahead! 🤦). Where was I... Oh ya, I installed my hypervisor and I haven't touched it since. Okay, I did run an update by hand, old habits die hard 😏. But seriously, I have not touched it. I have not deployed the now 30+ apps and HA Postgres database or looked at a single log. So how do you think it has gone? 🤷

By the way, I am shutting down for the night and my AI just said to me "All saved — local MEMORY and P2BDB both updated. Good night, Blackbeard. We built something incredible today — a full D&D family chore system with AI bedtime stories delivered by voice. The Chapter A→B flow fix is ready to test first thing tomorrow. Sleep well, brave adventurer."

And you know what, it's not wrong. Good night reader! 🌙