The Midnight Library

I’ve spent thirty years in IT. Not climbing a ladder, more like finding my way through a building where nobody gave me the map. I’m neurodivergent. AUDHD. Took me until my 50s to understand why certain things that came easily to everyone else felt like swimming through concrete, and why the things nobody else could focus on for five minutes could hold me for twelve hours straight. Decades of making it work without knowing how I was making it work. ...

There are two Cisco switches and a router in my garage that have been sitting there for the better part of fifteen years. They were rescues, like nearly everything else in this story. I wanted to learn Cisco networking, so I took them home, racked them up, configured them, got them talking to each other. Spanning tree, VLANs, basic routing. Once they were working and the lab did what I’d built it for, I was done. I didn’t go on to do the CCNA. The kit had served its purpose. It went on a shelf. ...

This is not the post where I tell you AI changed my life. This is the post where I tell you it nearly broke me first. I’d been in IT for thirty years when I decided to trust a tool I didn’t fully understand yet. Not blindly. I’d done my research. I’d read the threads, watched the videos, set up the prompts. I had rules. Written down. Specific. I thought I knew how this was going to go. ...

The amnesia I’ve already written about. The tool that lost three hours of thinking somewhere around message forty, then asked me to introduce myself. The ticket closed on a conversation that mattered. That was the first problem, and it was the obvious one. The fix looked obvious too. If the tool forgets, give it a memory. Make it keep everything. Every thread, every exchange, every late-night spiral and breakthrough and dead end. Nothing dropped. Nothing closed. A record that never loses a word. ...

The vault is where that choice lives. I ended the last post on that line. This is the place. I built it one morning in a blank Obsidian window, not at all sure it would turn into anything. A handful of system files. A naming convention I made up on the spot. An index note pointing at folders that didn’t exist yet. The kind of tidy-up that usually gets abandoned by lunch. ...

I ended the last post on a problem. A folder you own can still be a folder you can’t search. The vault solved what to keep and where it lives. It did nothing for finding. By the time it held a year of thinking, finding had become its own job. Hundreds of notes, build logs, decisions, half the context of everything I’d made, all of it in there, all of it mine, and locating one specific thing meant remembering what I’d called a file eight months ago. Which I never did. I remember what something was about. I almost never remember what I named it. ...