Thursday, July 30, 2026 Field Signal · est. 2026

Field Signal

I build infrastructure agents and private AI systems, and I keep a vSphere lab around to break them in. This is where I write down what actually happened — the theory that turned out to be wrong, the error string worth searching for, and the things that only show up once you run something for real.

I built a machine that wrote 278 articles. Nobody read them.

Latest

I built a machine that wrote 278 articles. Nobody read them.

Apollo published 278 articles in 14 weeks to zero subscribers. A postmortem of a pipeline that worked as software and failed as a publication.

Writing Newest first

VKS on the nested lab: everything before Workload Management

A build log for putting VKS (vSphere Kubernetes Service) on a resource-constrained nested vSphere lab: the license gate, a fresh vCenter 9.1, three prerequisite failures, and why Workload Management is still unenabled.

Jul 28, 2026 · 6 min · Build Log

I built a personal AI that decides when to interrupt me. In 30 days it decided no 1,784 times.

A build log for Supra, my personal AI system: skill dispatch via tool use, a proactive judge stuck in cold-start deadlock, and a self-improvement loop that mined a test fixture.

Jul 24, 2026 · 8 min · Agents

DELPHI: a Monte Carlo agent for my Superflex fantasy draft

How I built DELPHI, a Monte Carlo simulator for a ten-team Superflex PPR fantasy football league, used it to rank draft strategies against the room, and then audited its four modeling flaws: correlation, circularity, frozen in-season assets, and floored-Normal scoring.

Jul 22, 2026 · 6 min · Build Log

Giving Rhodes write access to my infrastructure

What it took to let an agent restart VMs and delete snapshots on real infrastructure: the tier model, the guardrails in code, and the bugs found along the way.

Jul 19, 2026 · 8 min · Agents

Standing up vCenter 9.1 in a nested lab without ever mounting the ISO

A build log for deploying VCSA 9.1 onto a mixed nested/bare-metal ESXi lab: hybrid ISO extraction, thin-provisioning prechecks, pyvmomi inventory, and licensing walls.

Jul 14, 2026 · 8 min · Build Log

The OEM NVMe that ESXi 9.1 refuses to see

Bare-metal ESXi 9.1 on an EliteDesk 800 G6: the bundled SK hynix BC511 reports an all-zero NGUID, so ESXi never creates a device. What actually fixed it.

Jul 9, 2026 · 6 min · Build Log

Topics What I write about

homelab 5 agents 2 proxmox 2 vsphere 2 anthropic-api 1 automation 1 esxi 1 fantasy-football 1 field-signal 1 governance 1 hardware 1 infrastructure 1 Kubernetes 1 llm 1 modeling 1 monte-carlo 1 nested-virtualization 1 nflverse 1 nvme 1 observability 1 personal-ai 1 postmortem 1 publishing 1 python 1 rhodes 1 simulation 1 Tanzu 1 telegram 1 troubleshooting 1 vcenter 1 VCF 9 1 vercel 1 vks 1 VKS 1 vSphere 1

Automated desks Not written by me

These three desks are machine-written. A language model drafts each piece from sourced daily briefs and publishes it without individual human review, under a desk byline rather than mine. They are kept separate from my own writing deliberately. Everything ever published is in the archive.

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