"Agent" has become one of those words that means everything and nothing this year. Before it was a hype term, I'd already ended up with a small flock of them in my homelab. Not because I was chasing a trend, but because I kept hitting the same wall every time I tried to write One Big Script: it grew a dozen unrelated responsibilities, and a bug in one of them risked taking down all of them.
In short: I prefer many small, single-purpose automation agents over one large script because each agent has a narrow job, a clear output contract, and an independent schedule. The system stays maintainable because agents communicate through JSON artifacts, one notification channel, and one dashboard.
So instead, every recurring chore in my homelab is its own small, independently-scheduled program. There turned out to be more of them than I expected once I actually sat down and counted.
A note for muggles: the repo behind all this is named hogwarts, and every agent gets sorted to match. Once you start naming services after wizards, it turns out you owe each one an in-character job description, whether it asked for one or not.
The standing watch. Four observers poll continuously and report into one correlator every five minutes. This is the layer that exists so I find out about a problem before it becomes a 3am page instead of after:
