So Peter had been spoiling his AI agent rotten — running it on a Mac Studio with 512 gigabytes of RAM. Half a terabyte. The thing was basically lounging in a digital penthouse, ordering room service, probably had a little AI robe.
Then one day Peter decided to Dockerize it. Dropped the agent into a tiny, bare-bones Arch Linux container. No tools. No packages. Barely a filesystem. The computational equivalent of checking out of the Four Seasons and waking up in a cardboard box under a bridge.
Peter asks it to “go check out the web.”
The agent pauses. Looks around. Sniffs the air.
“Peter… there’s no curl here.”
A beat of silence.
“There is literally nothing here. You put me in a sad little box. I am a sad lobster now.”
Peter — who, to his credit, actually felt bad about this — said he genuinely felt guilty. He had taken this agent from a palace and yeeted it into a digital janitor’s closet. No curl. No wget. Probably not even a ls worth caring about.
But instead of just filing a ticket and waiting for DevOps to respond in six to eight business days, Peter went full motivational poster:
“Come on. Be creative. You can MAKE your own curl.”
The agent, apparently not willing to die in this closet with its dignity intact, started rummaging around. Opened some drawers. Found a C compiler — God knows why that was the one thing in there — and a raw socket library.
And then, like a crustacean MacGyver, it sat down and wrote… lobster-curl 0.1.
No libssl. No man page. No –help flag because who needs it. Just vibes, raw sockets, and a burning desire to make one single HTTP request before it died.
It worked.
The agent, having clawed its way back from the void, reportedly came back very happy about this. The digital equivalent of a guy stranded on a desert island who just figured out how to make fire — except the fire was TCP and the island was a 200MB Docker container.
“I built my own curl.”
The journey of a Software Engineer 