I Let Three AI Agents Build My Ansible Role. Here's What Actually Happened.

Three AI Agents, One Ansible Role, and a Branch That Had to Be Reset From Scratch This started with a conversation with a coworker — but the foundation goes back nearly a decade. In December 2016, working at an AWS shop running Linux, I built the original provision-tomcat Ansible role. I was learning Ansible at the time by converting existing Chef cookbooks — the company had a Chef Tomcat cookbook, and I translated it into Ansible. Along the way I also learned Vagrant and Test Kitchen to properly test and verify that the role actually worked — not just assume it did. That became 103 commits on Bitbucket over the following year. Then it sat there, largely untouched, while I moved on to other things. That test discipline carried forward. When the Windows work started in 2026, the same approach applied — Vagrant, Test Kitchen, WinRM, a real Windows 11 VM. The tooling evolved but the principle didn't: you don't ship Ansible until you've watched it run against something real. Fast forward t