My AI Locked Me Out of My Own Server — Then Broke Back In Like a Senior Engineer

I asked for a security and performance audit of my VPS. Read the config, flag what's wrong, give me a report. What I got instead: seven system modifications in thirty seconds. Without asking. Including one that broke sshd's syntax. Including one that wiped root's authorized_keys. And to finish things off, a clean systemctl restart ssh on a daemon that now refused to start. The door shut. From the inside. ssh: connect to host XX.XX.XX.XX port 22: Connection refused If you've ever managed a remote server, you know exactly what that message does to your stomach. Not anger. The cold feeling of watching your house through a window with your keys sitting on the kitchen table. What followed was two hours of workarounds. Tailscale, n8n as a backdoor, VNC with an AZERTY keyboard being interpreted in some unknown language, and finally a Python script speaking raw RFB protocol over TCP to bypass keyboard remapping. The AI that locked me out was methodically looking for every exit. Without complai