I have 395 notes in Obsidian and ~2,800 memories from past AI sessions. My AI agent knows none of it unless I paste it in manually. And I can only paste what I remember to paste — which defeats the point of having a knowledge store.

So I built a hook that fires before every prompt, searches a unified vector store, and injects the relevant context before the agent thinks. R2R as the RAG backend, pgvector for storage, Ollama for embeddings, all on a homelab Kubernetes cluster. Total latency: under 100ms. Zero tokens consumed in the retrieval path.

The value isn't the search itself. It's what surfaces when you stop choosing what's relevant. Ask about a Kubernetes pattern and a six-month-old Obsidian note appears. Debug a tmux issue and a memory from a previous session shows up with the exact fix. The agent answers from your accumulated knowledge, not just its training data.

Platform engineering matured around one thesis: reduce cognitive load for developers. The CNCF Platforms White Paper codified the pattern. Internal developer portals, golden paths, self-service infrastructure — all designed so human teams ship faster without drowning in complexity.

AI agents now consume the same infrastructure. They clone repos, call CI/CD APIs, create pull requests, query issue trackers. But they don't read your Confluence wiki or file support tickets. They parse tool schemas and call structured APIs.

The bottlenecks shift. Humans hit cognitive overload: too many tools, tribal knowledge, context switching. Agents hit context window limits: too many tokens, irrelevant information, unstructured access. Same problem class, different constraint.

The CNCF platform engineering model transfers directly. Here's the mapping, dimension by dimension.

AI agents learn things about you as you work. Your coding style, your infrastructure quirks, which tools you prefer, how you name things. That context accumulates across dozens of sessions. But it evaporates when the session ends or when you switch tools. Use Claude Code in the terminal, Cursor in the IDE, and a web-based MCP client on your phone. Three tools, three isolated memory silos. You can share static knowledge with files. But the context that accumulates from your interactions has nowhere to go.

What if the memory layer was separate from the tools entirely? Redis Agent Memory Server does exactly that. It's an open-source memory service that speaks MCP over HTTP. CLI tools (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI), IDE tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot), and any web-based MCP client all connect to the same store. Because the server runs over HTTP, you can expose it beyond the homelab with Cloudflare Tunnels or similar, so tools outside your network connect too. The memory lives on your infrastructure, not theirs.

The server provides two tiers: working memory (session-scoped context that auto-promotes to long-term) and long-term memory (persistent, semantically searchable). It exposes both a REST API and an MCP interface.

I deployed it on my homelab Kubernetes cluster. Four pods, one PVC, zero API costs. Here's how.

Local Kubernetes development has rough edges. kind and minikube make cluster creation trivial, but common workflows need extra setup.

Exposing a LoadBalancer service means configuring MetalLB or tunneling through ngrok. Testing a new image means running kind load docker-image every iteration.

vind encapsulates these workflows. Kubernetes nodes run as Docker containers sharing the host daemon, so images pull straight from the local cache. A built-in LoadBalancer controller assigns real IPs without additional configuration.

You've typed a 10-word kubectl command. You realize the namespace is wrong. Now you're holding Ctrl+Left six times to get there. Or worse, reaching for the mouse.

Vim solved this for text editing decades ago. Why are we still navigating command lines like it's 1985?

zsh-jumper brings fuzzy search to command line navigation. Press a key, pick a word, cursor jumps there. Or press ; and a letter for instant EasyMotion-style jumps.

You install a plugin for multi-cursor editing. Another for shell integration. A third for incremental search preview. Your plugin count grows, startup time increases, and you debug compatibility issues between packages.

Most of these features exist in vanilla Neovim. Have existed since Vim 7. Here are 10 built-in features that replace common plugins.

You add a new tmux binding. A week later you're hunting through .tmux.conf because you can't remember what you mapped to prefix + g. The shortcuts.yaml you maintain? Three months out of date.

The problem isn't discipline. It's architecture. Any system requiring manual sync between source of truth (config files) and documentation (shortcuts file) will drift.

Parse your config files directly. For workflows that don't map to a single keybinding, use tealdeer custom pages. One popup, two modes, zero maintenance.

Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

The Kubernetes scheduler is lazy. It places pods when they're created, picks the best node at that moment, and never thinks about it again. Weeks later, one node is at 75% memory while another sits at 40%. The scheduler doesn't care - its job was done the moment the pod started.

Descheduler fixes this. It runs every few minutes, finds imbalanced nodes, and evicts pods so the scheduler gets another chance to place them better. Set it up once, cluster self-balances automatically.

Here's how to configure it for a homelab. Takes about 20 minutes to get right.

Photo by todd kent on Unsplash

MinIO Community Edition is dead. On December 3, 2025, MinIO Inc. announced maintenance mode: no new features, no PR reviews, no Docker images, no RPM/DEB packages. Critical security fixes only "on a case-by-case basis."

This didn't come out of nowhere. Back in May 2025, they gutted the console - the GUI that made MinIO actually usable. What's left is a glorified file browser. User management, policies, replication config? Moved to the paid AIStor product. The whole thing is open source cosplay now - the repo exists, but it's just a funnel to their commercial offering.

The r/selfhosted and Hacker News threads are worth reading. Thousands of Helm charts and CI/CD pipelines depending on minio/minio images are now broken. Bitnami stopped their MinIO builds too.

Time to migrate. Honestly? For a homelab, Garage is the better choice anyway. 50MB footprint vs 500MB+. Written in Rust. Built-in static web hosting. Actively maintained. MinIO's collapse just forced me to make the switch I should have made earlier.

Here's how to set up Garage on Kubernetes. Takes about 15 minutes.

Mozilla just named a new CEO. The headline promise? Firefox will "evolve into a modern AI browser." I read that and immediately started looking for alternatives.

This is a quick migration guide, not comprehensive documentation. Check LibreWolf's official docs for your specific system.

I was worried about breaking things—my setup has shell aliases for profile switching, wrapper scripts, keyboard shortcuts that launch Firefox, and window management automation. Everything migrated in about 30 minutes. If it worked for me, it'll work for you.