Series

For over a decade, sleeping late was just how I was wired. Quiet nights, no interruptions, my own pace. Then life required 6AM, every day — and I had nothing to give. This is what I did about it, what actually worked, and what didn't.

A few weeks into waking up at 6AM, I have enough distance now to say something I couldn't before: this wasn't just a schedule change. It quietly changed how I think about my days.

I had two old Intel NUCs, an obsession with AI agents that actually do things, and a decision to make about which machine gets which job. This is how I split them — and why the answer wasn't obvious.

The last post ended with Polaris's role shifting to embeddings and batch work. What actually happened was more interesting — it became a proper personal server in a single afternoon. nginx, WireGuard, Docker, GitLab Runners, and a weekly AI-powered security audit.

I put the Nexus backend under four progressively harder k6 load tests — smoke, stress, spike, and soak — while watching every CPU cycle and megabyte on Polaris. 300 concurrent users, zero failures, 40% CPU headroom. Here's what a NUC can actually handle.

I had Portainer running but it made figuring things out harder, not easier. And there was no single place to just click a link and open a service. I described the problem to Claude Code and it built me exactly what I needed.