{
patrick = {
role = "Senior DevOps, AI and security engineer";
at = "SLTN, Azure Expert MSP";
builds = [ "identity" "delivery" "recovery" "AI infrastructure" ];
writes = [ "Terraform" "Bicep" "PowerShell" "Python" "Rust" "Nix" ];
believes = "every change reviewed, nobody over-privileged";
home = "https://patrick.kappen.io";
};
}I build the platforms other people deploy to, and the guard rails around them. Most of my work sits where infrastructure, identity and automation meet, and lately a good part of it is about letting AI agents in without handing them the keys.
- If it's not in Git, it doesn't exist. Portal clicks are drift with extra steps.
- A backup you haven't restored is a rumour. Recovery gets tested, or it isn't there.
- Standing admin access is a bug, not a convenience. Rights are granted just in time and expire on their own.
- AI agents get the intern treatment. A sandbox, a reviewer, and no production keys. I've watched an automated PR merge a feature, revert it, and still announce it in the release notes.
- Boring in production, interesting in design. The exciting part should be the pull request, not the incident.
At SLTN I own the platform code that our cloud teams and customer tenants run on, and I work with our CISO to turn security policy into automation instead of documents.
That currently means moving the whole organisation from Azure DevOps to GitHub and swapping every stored pipeline secret for OIDC on the way. Customer access runs through GDAP, Azure Lighthouse and PIM, all in Terraform, so changing who can do what is a pull request like any other. Around that sit automated landing zones and disaster recovery drills that fail over a full Azure Site Recovery plan, prove the machines come back, and always clean up after themselves.
Open models as coding agents. I pick, benchmark and tune open-weight models on vLLM, with my own suite for tool calling, long agent tasks, long context and many agents at once. Models are chosen on measured numbers for the actual workload, not on a leaderboard.
Agents with boundaries. Sandboxed execution, scoped credentials, human-approved Git promotion and agent setups declared in Nix, so every one of them can be rebuilt and audited.
A homelab run like production. Proxmox, Talos Kubernetes, GitOps, OpenTofu and Ansible; TrueNAS and Proxmox Backup Server with 3-2-1 backups on 10 Gbit; Prometheus, Grafana and Loki watching it all. My machines are a NixOS fleet with signed commits, built so that a compromised GitHub account can't push code onto them.
Graft turns a few lines of TOML into Podman Quadlet containers built from the Nix store. Describe what the container needs; Nix builds the rest.
- Studying for GitHub Actions and AI-103
- Building a blog on patrick.kappen.io
Last changed Oct 2026.
pi-git · pi extension that commits, pushes and opens PRs with a helper agent, and watches CI until the PR is green
- 🐛 Prune delivered summaries after seven days · Oct 2026 · +64 −1
Delete delivered summaries older than seven days once per watcher round. - ✨ Start changes with git_start, push with git_push, and one-shot worktree, push and pr · Oct 2026 · +732 −26
One tool to start a change instead of two overlapping ones (#12 andgit_worktree), and push as its own guarded step. - ✨ Rebase a stacked PR on the next base after its base is merged · Oct 2026 · +95 −3
When the base of a stacked PR is squash-merged and deleted, GitHub moves the PR to the next base, and the PR then shows the old base's commits too. - ✨ Show all open work with git_status, and watch PRs made by hand with git_watch · Oct 2026 · +360 −3
git_status lists the PRs the watcher follows, what needs the user, and the worktrees with uncommitted or unpushed work, across repositories, so the main agent does not collect…
pi-skills · pi agent skills in a Nix flake, loaded per repository by the repo-skills extension
- ✨ Use the pi-git tools without watching CI, and change several repositories at once · Oct 2026 · +108 −10
The skill now covers git_check, git_commit, git_pr and git_request, says not to poll CI after git_pr (the watcher reports), and to call git_request at a lock instead of working…
pi-rules · pi extension that applies rules per repository: instructions, permissions and hooks
- ✨ Protect main and allow blocked calls once · Oct 2026 · +210 −8
Let users steer agents to worktrees for edits while retaining a one-time override that doesn’t change the permission rule.
- Cloud: Azure
- Automation & delivery: Terraform · Bicep · GitHub Actions · PowerShell · Azure DevOps · Ansible
- NixOS & deployment: NixOS
- Linux: Ubuntu
- Containers & orchestration: Kubernetes · Podman
- AI: LiteLLM · Phoenix
- Datacenter & virtualisation: Proxmox
- Networking: Tailscale · Traefik
- Storage & backup: TrueNAS
- Monitoring: Grafana