Surviving the AI Bubble With Two Pieces of Junk From Amazon
Everyone is building agents. You should build escape hatches. We are living through the most expensive group hallucination in tech history. Every SaaS now has a chatbot stapled to it. Every CEO is an "AI thought leader" on LinkedIn. Every startup pitch deck is just the words "autonomous," "agentic," and "10x" in different fonts. NVIDIA could buy a small country. OpenAI burns through more cash in a quarter than NASA did getting to the moon. And for what? So you can generate slightly worse emails, slightly faster? Look, I love AI. I actually build with it. But I have been around long enough to know what a bubble smells like. It smells like free credits, unearned confidence, and a thousand wrappers around the same API call. The bubble will pop. Not in a dramatic, newspapers falling from the sky way. It will pop quietly. Credits will dry up. Models will get paywalled behind enterprise tiers. The cloud bill you have been ignoring will finally show up. And all those beautiful, cloud-dependent workflows you built will start blinking red. So while everyone else is trying to figure out how to make their AI agent book a flight, I have been asking a different question. What do you build when you assume the internet will get worse, the cloud will get more expensive, and you will need actual skills that survive a downturn? The answer, annoyingly, is two pieces of junk from Amazon that cost less than your last Uber Eats order. Piece of Junk #1: The $25 Router That Sees Everything It is not sexy. It is called the GL.iNet GL-MT300N-V2. Everyone calls it the Mango. It looks like a little yellow box that should have come free with your ISP in 2014. You can buy it on Amazon for about twenty six dollars when it is on sale. Sometimes twenty. Inside it is a tiny Linux computer running OpenWrt. It has two ethernet ports, a USB port, and just enough RAM to be dangerous. Most people buy it to get free WiFi in hotels. I bought it to spy on my own network. Because here is the dirty secret of