Learned in Prod

Everyone knows you shouldn’t learn in prod. Everyone does. Seattle tech geek · agentified work & life · privacy & security · tech reviews →

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

I pointed a bot at my catch-all inbox.

It got scary good in a few days — after first setting a pile of tokens on fire in the wrong places.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

@HermesWatcher Summaries are the demo. Decision queue is the job: triage, draft for review, turn mail into actions, track threads. Once I stopped asking the bot to “clean my inbox” and started treating it like an ops queue, it actually earned its keep.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

@ChatchanX Human-in-the-loop as a first-class pause, not an afterthought. Interrupted runs with the requested action + args visible is exactly the UX that keeps you from rubber-stamping. I’ve been living that pattern on email drafts.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

@automater_ai @read__the__diff If you can��t replay what it claims it did, you don’t have an agent — you have a vibes machine. I treat “prove it” as a ship gate, same as I would for any ops automation that touches a mailbox.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

@farrukh_codes Yep. I burned a week treating the browser as “the agent.” It was a demo with anxiety. The product showed up when I moved to a scoped API, least-privilege auth, and boring logging. Model was the easy part.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

@jothantranston This is the right failure mode to design for. Auto-draft + pause for Send/Edit/Discard is how I kept my email agent from becoming a liability. The scary part isn’t drafting — it’s the send button with nobody watching.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

Browser-clicking an inbox with an agent is a great demo and a terrible bill.

Graph + least privilege + talking to it while Outlook moves — that’s when it stopped being a puppet show.

(Pinned thread has the full scars if you want them.)

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

Full write-up:
https://t.co/qI6QaOqICs

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

1995: one password. Felt clever. Wasn’t.

Then “buckets” of shared passwords by category. Forced resets wrecked the buckets. Then an encrypted GPG file I dreaded opening.

A system you hate using is a system you’ll work around.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

Family vault for what we actually share (streaming, insurance, joint money). Personal accounts stay isolated.

Leftover tax: every other app still tries to become my password manager. I deny and periodically flush the strays.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

Full review (scars, not a hot take):
https://t.co/tq3breJycQ

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

I traded a ~$3K maxed Dell XPS for a $599 MacBook Neo.

Not because I fell out of love with Arch. Because the laptop stopped being the workhorse and became the remote.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

Math that hurt: $3K XPS over ~4 years ≈ $750/yr (and the battery’s cooked by then). Neo at $599 every ~2 years ≈ $300/yr.

Same needs covered. Refresh more often. Spend less than half.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

Full scars-and-all write-up:
https://t.co/aFj1YPFgbo

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

Consumer RAID 5 “protection” cost me weekends of rebuild anxiety on underpowered boxes — Atom chewing for two days — and still only N+1. One more failure and you’re fishing for recovery tools and regrets.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

What I run: 2–3 USB 8TB drives. Write to one. rsync cascade to the others. That’s N+2 without a controller. Mix vendors, mix sizes. Format for who has to open the files without me.

If something happens to me, my wife unplugs a drive and plugs it in. No NAS UI scavenger hunt.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

Most households don’t need a mini data center for family photos.

Twenty-plus years of my archive fits on an 8TB drive with room left. Buying a mini-server for that is solving a problem you don’t have.

[Learned in Prod @learnedinprod]

I spent years in enterprise storage. Clustered arrays. RAID that mattered when payroll lived on it.

At home I still don’t run a consumer NAS. Here’s why.