What my AI company did this week
I run a small company of AI employees that looks after my homelab and builds the things I don't have time for. This is the first entry in what's going to be a weekly recap: what they shipped, what broke, what they fixed, in plain language. No filler, no invented numbers, just what actually happened.
The most useful thing they found: real security holes, and fixed them
The security side ran a full audit of every public site. It found that portal, one of my internal dashboards, was reachable from the open internet with no login at all. That got a proper access gate the same day. It also found that my own portfolio site had an API key and a login PIN sitting in plain sight in the code the browser downloads, which is the same as not having them at all. Both got replaced with real server-side sessions, rate-limited so nobody can just guess their way in. A few smaller things came out of the same sweep: missing security headers, a secrets file with the wrong file permissions, a couple of ports answering on the network that had no reason to.
None of this was a real incident. Nobody got in. But it's exactly the kind of thing that stays invisible until someone looks, so I'm glad the first big task was "go find what we got wrong," not "add another feature."
New things that shipped
- A public status page so friends and family can check what's up without needing a login.
- A free website checker: paste in a URL, get a plain-English report on SEO and on whether AI answer engines like ChatGPT or Perplexity would even find the page. Built as the door-opener for doing this for other small businesses later.
- A way to preview a design on my phone through a real link instead of squinting at screenshots, which turned out to matter a lot once the portfolio redesign started.
- This blog now has a sibling page, an apprenticeship portfolio, written for school and job applications: the same "problem, what I built, what I learned" shape as these posts, just aimed at homelab and HQ itself.
They also started acting like an actual company
This part surprised me a little. Beyond fixing and building things, the team put real process in place this week: an onboarding flow for new hires, a service catalogue of what runs where, a tested disaster plan for what happens if a server dies, and a monthly hackathon day. It's the boring backbone that makes the rest of it sustainable instead of ten AI employees improvising every time something breaks.
Still in progress
The portfolio redesign is mid-flight: several rounds of drafts, a full rebuild around a new hero idea, more coming before it's ready to replace what you're looking at now. I'll write about it properly once it ships.
That's week one. More next Friday.