Not sure which distro you were using, but most have an autostart gui option and you would have to make some serious spelling mistakes to brick your system.
In this case, Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi. I was trying to set up a script that would connect to a network storage device automatically. There's not a simple way to do it, you have to go about it in a hacky way.
Does it not use systemd? Sounds like a pretty easy systemd init script that waits on network.