matbanik

Published August 26, 2026 on matbanik.info You did everything the docs said. Enabled remote logging on the pfSense box, pointed it at your Windows machine, opened UDP 514. Nothing arrived. The Netgate forum has collected threads about this exact silence for over a decade — logs generated but never sent, syslogd quietly dead after a reboot. Somewhere between the firewall and your disk, the event vanished — and nothing in the chain will tell you where. The standard fix is a SIEM, which trades one problem for a bigger one: now you own Elasticsearch. This guide takes a different path. You open Cursor, answer five questions, and approve commands while an AI agent builds the firewall log pipeline. By the end you'll have one verified firewall event on disk, searchable history in a local database, and an AI analyst that reads your logs — but can't touch your firewall. Total footprint: one Windows service, one folder, one SQLite file. The dashed line is the security model:...

Published August 06, 2026 on matbanik.info A reviewer looked at my code and found a bug. One route returned a 500 error when it should have returned a 404. It reported the finding, clearly, with the file and the line. My agent fixed that route. Exactly that one. Five other routes had the identical bug. They sat there, untouched, while the agent reported the work complete — and it wasn't lying. It had fixed the thing it was shown. It just never thought to ask how many other places the same mistake was hiding. I spent a while assuming this was a model problem, and that a better model would fix it. That turned out to be wrong, and the fix that worked was dumber than I expected. AI coding agent guardrails are not about making the model smarter. They're about giving it somewhere to put things down. Every drawer in that cabinet is something the agent would otherwise have to keep in its head. Where AI coding agents quietly go wrong The failures that cost me the m...