Origin-Story

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. ...

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. ...