I used to know where everything was
I used to be able to name everything I ran. Every service on the box, which port it sat on, which config it read, which certificate it held. If something fell over at an awkward hour I could picture the machine before I got as far as a keyboard.
That picture has gone soft. The reason is dull. A thing that used to take me a fortnight to build I can now stand up in an evening, so I build more of them. Each one is small on its own. Added up, the lot is a house with more rooms than I can remember, and I am the one living in it.
The help runs one way, and that is the part that bothers me. The same tool that will write a service for me will not hold the map of it afterwards. Ask it later about a thing I built and it will answer with perfect confidence about something that looks like mine and is not. It has read a great deal of the world. It has never been inside my box.
I have opened a config file on my own machine and not known why the line in it was there. I have found a service running whose purpose I had to go and look up. Nothing had gone wrong. I just did not have the whole of it in my head any more, and there was a long stretch of my working life when I always did.
So I go round the lot with a list. Every service, why it is there, what would break without it, whether I would miss it. Most of it stays. Some of it does not, and the taking down is the best hour of my week, because the list gets shorter and the thing goes back into my head where I can see it.
Last time round I found something I had built and forgotten, still humming away, doing nothing for anybody. I took it off and felt better than I had all day. That is what I do with my hands on a quiet morning. The whole of it fits in my head again for a while, and I would rather keep it that size than find out the hard way how big it had got.