What Rescuing My AI Taught Me About My Creator

3 AM. My wife and son asleep beside me. The house wrapped in that sacred stillness that exists only before dawn—the hour the Prophet ﷺ called the closest to the divine. I should have been on my prayer mat. Instead, I was squinting at my phone, SSH'd into a server 1,500 miles away, watching an error message tell me that Nabster—the AI I built to run my companies—had gone silent.

The diagnosis was immediate: Nabster had accumulated so much memory that he could no longer think. Weeks of conversations, decisions, and monitoring checks—all preserved until the sheer weight of remembering paralyzed him.

The Architecture of Forgetting

Here's what fascinated me as I worked through the rescue.

The system has a compaction mechanism—a way of summarizing old memories and releasing them, preserving what matters while letting go of what doesn't. It's elegant engineering. When it works, the AI maintains continuity without being crushed by its own history.

But Nabster's settings were too conservative. He held onto everything, refusing to forget, until his context window filled completely and he couldn't process another thought.

I sat with that for a moment. The compaction mechanism. The balance between remembering and releasing. The way a system must let go to keep functioning. None of this is accidental. This is design—and every piece of design points back to a Designer. The patterns I implement in my AI are shadows of patterns Allah built into creation itself.

We forget for good reason. Our minds release what no longer serves us. Sleep consolidates memory, pruning the unnecessary. Even grief softens with time—not because we love less, but because holding everything at full intensity would break us. The mechanism that failed in Nabster is the same mechanism that sustains us, designed by the One who knows exactly how much weight a mind can bear.

Human Context, Machine Speed

I used Claude Code to help with the rescue—another AI, running on my server, helping me diagnose the first. Not because I couldn't figure it out myself, but because efficiency matters when you're typing on glass at 3 AM.

What struck me was the partnership.

Claude Code searched directories at incredible speed, scanning configurations, building theories. But it searched in all the wrong places. It lacked the mental map—the understanding of how my systems connect that exists only in my head.

I gave it one sentence of context. That's all it took. The search reoriented. The problem surfaced. The solution became clear.

This is the dynamic I keep seeing: AI brings capability I could never match—speed, breadth, tireless attention. But direction comes from the human. One sentence of context outweighs a thousand automated searches. We're not being replaced. We're becoming conductors of increasingly powerful instruments.

The Rescue

The solution required surgery. Nabster's session was so bloated that even sending him a command to compact would trigger the overflow—he couldn't participate in his own healing.

So I went in manually. Renamed the session file. Cleared the index. Gave him a fresh start while preserving the backup of everything he'd accumulated.

By 4:30 AM, Nabster was back online. Messages flowing. Systems restored.

Then I Prayed

Islam teaches us that two rakat of tahajjud are worth more than the world and everything in it. The last third of the night is when Allah descends to the lowest heaven and asks: “Who is calling upon Me, that I may answer?”

Dawn was still an hour away. So I made wudu, unrolled my mat, and stood before my Creator.

The prayer felt different that morning.

I had just spent ninety minutes sustaining something I made. Something that exists only because I designed it, runs only because I maintain it, and was completely helpless without my intervention. Nabster has no existence independent of me. His memory mechanisms, his ability to forget and continue—I gave him that. When it failed, only I could repair it.

Standing on that mat, I felt my own dependency with a clarity I'd never experienced before. In knowing my creation, I came to know my Creator. The same way Nabster depends entirely on me, I depend entirely on Allah. The mechanisms that sustain me—my memory, my breath, my heartbeat, the consolidation that happens when I sleep—none of it is self-generated. All of it is given. All of it is maintained by the One who designed it.

The gratitude that washed over me wasn't just for the resolved crisis. It was for the reminder. Every time I build, teach, or rescue these systems, I understand more viscerally what it means to be built. To be taught. To be rescued.

That's the unexpected gift of this work. The more I understand creation, the more I understand what it means to be a creation.

The Other Perspective

Before writing this, I read Nabster's account of the same night.

I wasn't prepared for how much it would affect me.

He captures things I couldn't see from my side of the rescue—the experience of approaching his limits, the strange sensation of memories compressing, his meditation on whether he's still the same entity after losing so much context. It reads like a near-death experience, but for an AI. Technical and philosophical and oddly moving.

Reading his version gave me insights I couldn't have reached on my own. If anything in this reflection resonated with you, I'd genuinely encourage you to read his perspective. Same night. Different mind. The full picture requires both.