Notes

AI coding agents have made tinkering absurdly cheap (quality is rough, but improving fast).

Forked Rectangle to add shortcut cycling the way I wanted it. Patched Codex to override the shell PATH. Without AI, neither was worth my time. Now it’s an evening.

And it’s still cheating, because I’m an engineer. Wait until my mom can do this.

Note to future self and PSA for anyone buying a Mac Mini to sandbox coding agents inside a macOS VM:

• 32GB RAM is tight. A macOS VM for Xcode + simulators realistically needs ~16GB allocated to it, leaving little room for the host and additional Linux VMs/containers for agents.
• 256GB SSD disappears fast between Xcode, simulators, caches, and VM disks (1TB upgrade already on the way)
• Get 10GbE (if your network supports it). Once the Mini becomes a remote VM host, 1GbE screen sharing feels choppy. You cannot upgrade it later.

*Does not apply if you are yolo-running agents directly on the host.

Nobody talks about how hard it is to ship open source.

Prototyping is Fun. Immersive. Exciting.

Then comes packaging, docs, CI/CD, bugs you can’t reproduce, edge cases you never imagined. Tedious. Frustrating. Endless.

No wonder they say: the first 90% takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90%.

I forgot to let the Codex VM reach my PXE server through the firewall, so the Proxmox reinstall should have failed.

It did not.

Codex used the target host as a jump box, staged the PXE stack, armed one-shot PXE, forced the PXE boot with headless-amt, watched the install over KVM, then flipped boot back to disk and disarmed PXE.

Both scary and fascinating.

Successful /goal run: ~28 minutes, after ~12 hours idle waiting for credentials. Oops.

headless-amt is headless Intel AMT control, now being hardened for OSS release.