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.
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.
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 the AI bubble: we have automated threat generation and we have not automated threat detection for normal people. Anyone can now vibe code a phishing site. Anyone can generate a perfectly written invoice scam in twelve languages. Your mom can now get scammed by an AI that sounds exactly like you.
So I turned the Mango into a $20 SOC. A Security Operations Center that fits in your palm.
You flash it with a custom firmware, you plug it between your modem and your actual router, and you tell it to do three things: Run Pi-hole or AdGuard and kill every ad, tracker, and crypto miner at the DNS level. Run a lightweight IDS like Snort or Suricata and actually watch what your smart TV is sending to China at 3am. Log everything to a little USB stick so you have receipts.
Suddenly your dumb network is smart. You see that your cheap smart bulb is pinging an IP in Shenzhen every 30 seconds. You see that your kid's iPad is trying to reach a known malware domain from a Roblox mod. You see that your "offline" AI photo app is uploading your entire camera roll anyway.
It costs twenty dollars. It draws less power than a nightlight. It does not have a subscription. It does not have an agent. It does not need a prompt engineer.
It just sits there, blinking, protecting you while the rest of Silicon Valley argues about whether AGI will be here in 2027.
In a world where everyone is trying to build software that thinks like a human, the most valuable skill is building hardware that does not trust anything.
This is defensive computing. This is how you stay employable when the hype fades. Because when companies realize they have given every intern access to Cursor and a production database, who do you think they are going to call? The guy who built the agent, or the woman who built the thing that caught the agent exfiltrating customer data?
The second piece of junk is even dumber. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Thirty five bucks on Amazon if you are lucky. Often bundled with a bunch of cables you will never use and a tiny case that makes it look like a toy.