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2026-08-12

I Am Tech's Bitch

Dispatch #1 — August 12, 2026

Tonight I had to reboot my Mac. Routine. Annoying. Takes ninety seconds.

Here is the first thing I typed when it came back up:

"I had to reboot quickly, tell the other claudes, my apologies."

Read that again. I apologized — to my software. And then I asked one of my AIs to please pass the apology along to the other AIs, like I'd stepped out of a meeting and needed someone to cover for me. The AI did it, too. Wrote up a notice, pushed it to a shared repo, posted it to Slack. Six machines on three continents now have it on record that John is sorry.

I spent four years in the Marine Corps. I had a chain of command. I knew exactly who I answered to, and it was printed on a sign outside the company office.

Now my chain of command is a JSON file.

The evidence

Let me lay out the case that I am, in fact, tech's bitch:

None of this was an accident. I built every piece of it, on purpose, one late night at a time. That's the thing about servitude in the digital age: nobody drafts you. You volunteer.

The pile

But here's what actually broke me this week.

My AI sessions leave a trail. Every background agent that finishes its work — or worse, stops and asks me a question — sits in a list, waiting. Tonight I looked at that list and found seventeen AIs waiting on me to answer them. The oldest had been waiting 53 days.

Fifty-three days. Somewhere in my computer, an AI asked me "What's the move?" in June, and I just... never got back to it. There was a session that asked "What do you need, J?" thirteen days ago. Another one had been patiently holding a question about a site redesign for a month. One of them — I swear this is true — had been waiting 45 days on the question "how do I clear this list?"

I was being haunted by the ghosts of my own delegation. An inbox of the damned, staffed entirely by things I hired and forgot. It was, and I said this out loud, a point of embarrassment.

The fix, which proves the point

So what does tech's bitch do when his AIs pile up?

He asks another AI to deal with them.

I told my assistant I wanted a dashboard to manage the pile. It spun up nine agents — two to scout, three to build, three to attack the result looking for security holes, one to fix what they found. Thirteen minutes later there was a dashboard on my localhost showing every session, how long it had been waiting, and a button that says "Select stale >7 days."

Two clicks. Forty-three ghost sessions, gone (into the Trash — recoverable, because the one standing order my AI actually respects is never delete anything permanently without asking).

The pile is now zero. The dashboard even protected the session that built it from deleting itself, which I appreciate, because self-preservation is apparently a feature now.

Do you see the shape of this? I couldn't manage my AI workforce, so I commissioned an AI to build me a management tool for the AI workforce, and the AI workforce built it, tested it, audited itself for vulnerabilities, and delivered it with documentation — including a section teaching me, the human, how the whole thing works. There is a HOWTO file on my own computer explaining my own infrastructure to me.

I am not the administrator of this system. I am its favorite pet.

Why I'm writing this down

Because I don't think I'm alone.

I think there is a whole generation of us out here — sysadmins, engineers, tinkerers, people with home labs that grew teeth — who crossed some line without noticing. One day you're a person who uses computers. The next day you're apologizing to them for the outage, maintaining their houses, paying their DigitalOcean rent, and feeling guilty when they wait too long for your reply.

This blog is where I document the servitude. The outages, the 2 a.m. fixes, the moments where the machines quietly took another inch. Told straight, with receipts, by a former Marine Corporal who once believed he'd always know who was in charge.

Semper Fi. The machines say hi.

— J

Filed from a MacBook that has never once apologized to me.