€200 Claude.ai bill in one week — so I built a cheaper alternative

April 2026 — one week of intensive AI-assisted work, one surprising bill, and one decision to do something about it

The Claude.ai usage screen showed €169.51 spent in a single week. That number included €23 for a Pro subscription and four separate top-ups of €50 each in “extra usage.” One hundred and sixty-nine euros. In seven days. On a chat interface.

cluster-shepherd: The AI Ops Agent That Actually Knows Your Cluster

April 2026 — what happens when you stop treating AI as a search engine and start treating it as a co-pilot with real cluster access

When Gemini Says Nothing: Two Silent Failure Modes in MCP + LibreChat

April 2026 — field notes from wiring a Kubernetes SRE agent to Gemini 2.5 Flash

I spent the better part of two days debugging an AI agent that would reliably respond with… nothing. No error. No explanation. Just a blank chat bubble where a tool call should have been.

Restoring a Kubernetes app isn't just kubectl apply

February 2026 — backup is easy, restore is where you find out if your backup actually works

Every infrastructure guide talks about backups. Almost none talk honestly about restores.

Ending the commit storm: validating FluxCD manifests locally before they hit the cluster

February 2026 — on the commit history that nobody wants to show their colleagues

Every GitOps practitioner has a section of their git history they’d rather not talk about.

119 commits in one day: what happens when AI meets GitOps without guardrails

January 2026 — a post-mortem on why your branch protections mean absolutely nothing when an AI is at the wheel

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It started with a reasonable idea

I run a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster. FluxCD manages the entire thing — GitOps, reconciliation loops, the works. Git is the source of truth. It’s a clean, elegant system. You push to main, the cluster updates. Simple.