I've been building an autonomous penetration-testing agent — an LLM driving real tools (nmap, masscan, hydra, Metasploit, searchsploit) around a loop: recon a target, pick an exploit, fire it, decide whether it worked, move on. Everything below runs against a deliberately vulnerable Metasploitable VM in an isolated lab. Nothing here is a technique for attacking systems you don't own; it's a story about making an AI agent tell the truth about what it did. Because the first hard lesson...