Mitchell Report

caddy

A distressed, retro-futurist poster shows a huge white-and-gray robot with glowing blue eyes and the word “caddy” on its chest looming over a city at dusk. At left, large cream and red lettering reads “THE DAY CADDY STOOD STILL,” with the smaller subtitle “A BANDWIDTH LIMIT, A VPS UPDATE, AND ONE ALUMINUM FOIL HAT MOMENT.” At right, a towering red warning display bears a triangular alert icon and the text “402 PAYMENT REQUIRED.” Below it, four status rows—“Packages,” “Updates,” “Repositories,” and “Downloads”—each read “Stalled…” beside a loading spinner. In the foreground, a crowd of men and women in mid-century clothing, including a man in a dark hat saluting or shielding his eyes, stare up at the robot and display. City buildings and an elevated roadway sit beneath a smoky blue-and-gold sky; red warning lights glow on the display. The image has a dramatic, weathered comic-book-poster style.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to update my VPS. Usually, I do this once a week, sometimes more frequently depending on any security news I see. I should probably have the AI agents I use do this, but I do it myself for now. I find infrastructure interesting and “boring” in a good way most of the time.

While updating one of my VPSes, I got a message saying I needed to pay for access to Caddy because the repository had reached its bandwidth limit. This was from a company called Cloudsmith. I wasn't the only one getting this message, either. There was already a large discussion going on over at Caddy's GitHub.

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