We Cut Our AI Infrastructure by 60% (And Everything Got Better)

Today we gutted our entire AI infrastructure. What started as 10 containers and 5 VMs became 4 containers and 3 VMs. Here's why cutting was the best engineering decision we've made. The Problem: Zombie Infrastructure Over the past three weeks building MFS Corp — an AI-first company with autonomous agents — we accumulated cruft fast. Containers that never finished setup. VMs running services that migrated elsewhere. Cron jobs calling commands that didn't exist. Alert systems sending false positives hourly. Sound familiar? This is what happens when you build fast without pruning. Here's what we found during our audit: 3 containers that never completed bootstrapping (still had their BOOTSTRAP.md files) 21 system cron entries calling a script that used an invalid CLI command — every single one silently failing 35,414 unprocessed message files in one agent's inbox (86MB of dead data) 3 workflow automations sending false alerts every hour about "unreachable" services that were actually fine