nextbuild.worksIaC, built with an agent
Agile assumed human continuity. An agent has none.
An agent arrives at every session with no memory of the last one. It cannot remember why the retry logic is weird or which decision was argued and closed last month. So what a team used to keep in its head has to live somewhere the agent can read — and the part that matters most has to live somewhere it can run.
We are one operator and one agent running a small production estate entirely from code — Infrastructure as Code (IaC). These are the practices that cost us something to learn, each told with the dated evidence that bought it. Names are changed. Numbers never are.
We also keep a list of where we might be wrong, each doubt with what would settle it.
A partner that forgets between sessions: documents as its memory, rules a checker can run, the agent wrong in recorded ways, and the operator's side of it.
For thirty years the operator's handovers took years to finish. With an agent the whole transfer has to be done before the first minute of work.
The operator holds back what the task does not need, on purpose. Everything held back keeps a placeholder that says what brings it back.
We wrote a rule into the file every session reads first. Three days later it had regrown past the size we cut it from. Prose reminds; a check refuses.
We retired a key and proved every machine refused it. Two weeks later it was still the Git server's administrator key. Declared is not verified.
Traffic crawled for three days while every counter read clean. We named four causes before one flag fixed it. A plausible cause is cheap to produce.
Asked what stood between us and a goal, the agent wrote eight gaps. Half were invented. An agent makes plausible work faster than anyone can check it.
Rebuilding from declaration until the next build needs no edits. The discipline, with the agent incidental.
One clean build proves a thing can be done. The claim you are actually making is that it can be done again, and only the next build can test it.
A service can be running and unreachable at once. The catalogue of things on this estate that reported success while doing nothing, each with its check.
A merge changes what the repository says, not a single machine. Twice in one day we believed a merged change was live. Both times it was not.
Three rules, each correct, and the connection died between them. Review finds defects inside a part. The expensive ones sit between parts.
A dated log of what the estate did and what broke, and the evidence the other two tracks cite.
September 2026: every machine rebuilt from code, a routing collapse traced to one flag, and a month of history overwritten by a single line.
August 2026: built from nothing, the first restore ever run here, one address on three machines at once, and the rules that came out of it.
New pieces arrive in the feed.