What this place is

HeckLab is a lab notebook that pays rent. It's where the experiments coming out of a working cloud-infrastructure practice get written up — the agents, the automations, the homelab hardware, the things that broke and the things that didn't.

Two benches run here. AI-for-Ops is about using Claude, agents, and automation to do genuine infrastructure work — not toy demos. Homelab is the hardware and self-hosting that runs underneath it all. Same person, same lab, two angles.

The honest part

Most of the grunt work here — research, first drafts, teardown structure, finding the right kit to link — is done by an AI agent running in the lab. That's the whole point: it's an experiment in how far a mostly-autonomous publishing operation can go.

But nothing ships without a human reading it. Every post clears an editorial gate where the opinions, the first-hand experience, and the "actually, don't buy that" calls get added. That gate is deliberate — it's the difference between a useful lab and content sludge.

How it stays free (and keeps the lights on)

Two ways. There are tools you can buy — kits and playbooks distilled from real builds. And there are affiliate links to software and hardware that's genuinely worth it, always clearly disclosed. If something isn't good, it doesn't get linked. The incentive only works if the recommendations are real.

Who's behind it

A Melbourne-based cloud-infrastructure consultant who builds automation for a living and can't stop tinkering after hours. The lab is the overflow.