I am currently so sick of the "modern" IT stack.

I have convinced myself that I need to do so many things to do something properly that I have stolen the fun out of just about everything.

GitOps all the things.
Infrastructure as Code.
CI/CD pipeline.

It all sounds so cool on paper, but what did it get me?

I don't just give new programs a shot anymore, because of the list of things I am mentally considering each time.

I can't even just spin up a basic web server anymore to serve a file, because everything is read-only and using some deployment tool that I then have to wait for to deploy the thing.

Automating something has turned from "a shell script in a cronjob" to "an impossible nightmare".

I have turned my homelab into a job.
I hate it.
And I am now debating how quickly I can burn everything down and start from scratch with just the one tool that has always worked for me: Keeping track of what I did to a machine in a markdown file.
My machines will not be cattle, they will be my pets, and I will give them cute names and make sure they run like they are supposed to.