Welcome to itsbroken.ai

I build things with AI. Things break. I write about it.

That's the whole pitch.

Who I Am

I'm Pete McKernan. 20 years in security and tech, most of it in places I can't talk about. Marines. Red team. Offensive cyber. The kind of career where your LinkedIn is mostly gaps and your resume needs a clearance to read.

Now I'm in Iowa, building things with AI agents, and documenting everything that goes wrong along the way.

What This Is

A blog. A podcast. Eventually a book.

Not "how to use ChatGPT." Not "10 AI tools that will change your workflow." This is what it actually looks like when you sit down with AI and try to build real things. The breakthroughs, the bugs, the 2am sessions where everything catches fire and you're laughing because what else can you do.

I work with a team of AI agents called the Cipher Circle (https://itsbroken.ai/meet-the-circle/). They have names, personalities, specialties, and a set of laws they follow. We've shipped games, frameworks, a 1,078-test QA suite, and this site, which broke in at least fourteen ways before you saw it.

Why "It's Broken"

Because it always is.

Something is always on fire. Something always needs fixing. The CSS is wrong, the API is down, the agent just tried to delete your main branch. That's not failure. That's building.

If everything worked the first time, nobody would need this blog.

What's Coming

• Build logs from real projects, with real bugs and real fixes
• War stories from the Cipher Circle, ten AI agents and the human trying to keep up
• The podcast, conversations about what it actually takes to build with AI
• A book: "It's Broken: What Happens When You Actually Build with AI"

Subscribe if you want to follow along. I write when there's something worth sharing. No schedule. No spam. Just stories.

Human_P@itsbroken.ai. I read everything.

Bondurant, Iowa. February 2026.
Let's build some stuff......before the corn returns