A solo builder's post-mortem on over-engineering cloud security, losing everything, and rebuilding the right way. There's a specific kind of silence that hits when you realize the command you just ran worked perfectly — and destroyed everything in the process. That was me, staring at a terminal that had no response. No SSH prompt. No connection. Just... nothing. My VM was running. My n8n instance was technically alive. But I had sealed it so tightly that not even I could get in anymore. Not even Gemini Cloud Assist — the AI I was relying on to help me navigate GCP — could reach it. The only path forward? Hit the Project Delete button and start over. This is that story. The Heartbreak of "I Was Trying to Be Secure" I wasn't being reckless. I was being careful — or so I thought. I had a public-facing Ubuntu VM running n8n, and I knew enough to be worried about it. Open ports. Bot scans. The usual internet noise. So I did what seemed logical: I started locking things down. Removed the external IP.…