// chris johnsonField notes on cybersecurity, AI-assisted development, infrastructure, and the craft of shipping things that actually work.
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The Clients page showed "--" for traffic and "DPI not available for this device" for applications. The investigation found that per-app DPI is genuinely dead on this firmware, but per-client hourly byte buckets are alive and well in a different endpoint the dashboard was never reading. Fix the source, accumulate in ClickHouse, reconstruct Top Applications from Pi-hole DNS, and then discover that some clients are reporting physically impossible volumes. One afternoon, one commit (e07a8ac, 27 files), three confessional asides, and a plausibility cap that became load-bearing.
My Gmail assistant ran clean for two months, then quietly died for a full week before I noticed. The bridge daemon that drove it had pinned itself to a stale Claude CLI version, every scheduled fire failed within seconds, and no transcript was ever written. This post walks through why I migrated the agent off Claude Routines and onto the Claude Agent SDK, what the new stack looks like on launchd, and the parity gate that has to pass before the old agent gets decommissioned.
5 existing Pi-hole MCPs. 1 actively maintained. 10 real gap items. I used /deep-research to scan the landscape, then consolidated 28 tools from three upstream repos into one Python FastMCP server that matches my UniFi MCP stack, and shipped it public with CI, issue templates, and branch protection.