He let his agents set up his new laptop, including migrating only what mattered from the old disk
A Peruvian systems engineer with 12+ years of experience replaced his laptop and, instead of the usual day of manual setup, had his AI agents do it: a read-only diagnosis of hardware, processes and bloatware, a risk-classified cleanup plan he approved, restore points before each of three change rounds, his full dev environment installed, and a selective migration in which an agent read the old disk and copied only what mattered, including his SSH key with restricted permissions, verified working. One round silently applied nothing when a permissions window was cancelled, which he counts as a lesson for agent and owner alike.
How it works
- Agent runs a read-only diagnosis and proposes a plan, flagging what must not be touched
- Owner approves
- Three change rounds, each preceded by a restore point, remove bloatware and telemetry and install 21 pending updates
- Dev stack installed: Git, VS Code, Node, Python, GitHub CLI, WSL2 capped at 8 GB
- A second agent generates a fresh VPN key on the laptop, private half never leaving it
- Another agent mines the old disk and copies only selected items, SSH key included, permissions restricted and access verified
Why it’s worth knowing
The migration was the delegation: rather than cloning the old machine, an agent read the old disk like an archivist and brought only what he still uses, keys verified and permissions locked down.
Where it’s from
Summarized from a public post on joseareche.com. See the original ↗