// The 2026 Rebuild

The 2026 Rebuild

What almost killed my IT operation in January 2026 — and the rebuild that became the foundation of everything DATA-PS now builds.

In January 2026 a PSU fire killed one of my homelab servers. An AI agent killed the second one trying to help. By the end of the month, an AI-driven recovery plan had wiped every disk on every machine — and I was as close to walking away from IT as I’ve ever been.

I didn’t walk away. I rebuilt. The rebuild taught me more about working with AI agents than the previous decade of using them ever had. This is the story of what happened, what I learned, and the tools DATA-PS now builds because of what I learned.

The chapters below are the start; more are coming as I write them.

Planned chapters

Catastrophe

  1. The day my AI agent wiped all my servers

The reset

  1. It’s not the agent. It’s what you tell it.
  2. I gave my AI agent root. It got safer.
  3. From tutorial docs to agent-readable docs

Rebuild

  1. Disaster #2: how the rebuild proved itself
  2. Why I built Lola to talk first, not to work
  3. Each agent gets its own machine

Tools that came out of it

  1. Rebuilding Agent-Elno in 30 days
  2. Releasing Agent-Elno for free — and what happened next
  3. Toward a public standard for AI-readable specs

Sequence and titles may shift. Available chapters appear in the list below.