Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

fulghum.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 570 posts

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#431

Post by river_otter »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #380
river_otter wrote: post #379

Next level up is self hosting your LLM! I put LM Studio on a mac mini at home and have been extremely happy with it. Then you can use a tool like opencode to connect to that LLM and boom, Claude Code dependency is removed and you just got even more self-hosted. For what you're using Claude Code for, a smaller open-weight model would probably work fine

Well, to a limit. I have an RTX 3090 24gb that enables a lot of use-cases. But for what i'm using Agents right now, claude code is the tool to go.

makes sense. You could look at something like https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router if at some point you're interested in going down that path. I've been using gpt-oss-20b which would fit on your GPU and I've found useful for basic tasks like recipe creation and agentic tool usage (I use it with Notion MCP tools)

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#432

Post by Draiken »

mr-karan wrote: post #373

I've landed on a similar philosophy but with a slightly different approach to orchestration. Instead of managing everything interactively, I built a lightweight bash-based deployment system that uses rsync + docker compose across multiple machines. The structure is dead simple: `machines/ /stacks/ /` with a `config.sh` per machine defining SSH settings and optional pre/post deploy hooks. One command syncs files and r…

I use Ansible.

It's simple enough and I had some prior experience with it, so I merely have some variables, roles that render a docker-compose.yml.j2 template and boom. It all works, I have easy access to secrets, shared variables among stacks and run it with a simple `ansible-playbook` call.

If I forget/don't know the Ansible modules, Claude or their docs are really easy to use.

Every time I went down a bash script route I felt like I was re-inventing something like Ansible.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#433

Post by Draiken »

compounding_it wrote: post #321

I don't really understand this post completely. >I am spending time using software, learning, and having fun - instead of maintaining it and stressing out about it. Using software, learning and having fun with with what? everything is being done by Claude here. The part of fun and learning is to learn to use and maintain it in the first place. How will you learn anything if Claude is doing everything for you ? You ar…

LLMs give you that dopamine hit without the effort.

I did it! Except you didn't and you don't know anything about what it did or learned anything along the way. Success?

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#434

Post by tbyehl »

My favorite genre of post in r/homelab and r/selfhosted this past year has been "I used AI to set all this stuff up and something broke so I asked AI to fix it and now all my data is gone."

There are so many NAS + Curated App Catalog distros out there that make self-hosting trivial without needing to Vibe SysAdmin.

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#436

Post by johnisgood »

InfinityByTen wrote: post #410
johnisgood wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rm -rf comparison is a bit dramatic. WireGuard's config is conceptually simple: your key, peer's key, endpoint, what IPs route through the tunnel. The "implications" are minimal. It is a point-to-point encrypted tunnel. Being overwhelmed by networking basics is worth addressing regardless. It comes up constantly: debugging connectivity, deployments, understanding why your app cannot reach a database. 30 minutes w…

I do agree on that using LLMs to demistify, learn and explore is better alternative than handing it off to go rouge on, is a better advice. That's how I used it last weekend and I think that's what I would advocate the usage instead of just letting YourFavouriteAI be the sys admin. My problem is not just networking knowledge. I genuinely faced issues with open source tools. Troubleshooting in the days of terrible sea…

Thank you for your reply!

I am glad that it is useful to you! The "terrible search + outdated forum posts" problem is real for sure. LLMs genuinely help there by synthesizing across versions and explaining what changed.

I would say that self-hosting with AI assistance is the right approach. Use it to understand, not to blindly execute. Trust me, it is not much of a deal and you will be happy to have gone with this route afterwards!

Good luck with the setup. If you have any questions, let me know, I am always happy to help.

(I have very briefly mentioned some stuff here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46586406 but I can expand and be a bit more detailed as needed.)

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#438

Post by raxxorraxor »

stuaxo wrote: post #437

Is everyone just running claude code not even in a container, letting it go wild and change stuff?

I use Cursor and quickly let it run pretty wild. Claude doesn't seem to mind to extract auth info from everywhere. Cursor usually blacklists some files for AI access depending on language and environment, but Claude just queries environment variables without even simulating a bad conscience. Probably info that gets extracted by the next programmer using it. Well, whoops...

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#439

Post by yreg »

b112 wrote: post #398
johnisgood wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same applies to Tailscale. A Tailscale client, coordination plane vulnerability, or incomplete understanding of their trust model is also all it takes. You are adding attack surface, not removing it. If your threat model includes "OpenSSH might have an RCE" then "Tailscale might have an RCE" belongs there too. If you are exposing a handful of hardened services on infrastructure you control, Tailscale adds complexity…

There was a time when people were allowed to drive cars unlicensed. These days, that seems insane. As the traffic grew, as speeds increased, licensing became necessary. I think, these days, we're almost into that category. I don't say this happily. But having unrestricted access seems like an era coming to an end. I realise this seems unworkable. But so was the idea of a driver's license. Sometimes society and safety…

Can you be more concrete what do you predict?

Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

#440

Post by mvanbaak »

piqufoh wrote: post #386

I'm working on something very similar, but I've found that if I'm not doing the work - I forget what has been set up and how its running a lot faster. For example - I have ZFS running with a 5-bay HDD enclosure, and I honestly can't remember any of the rules about import-ing / export-ing to stop / start / add / remove pools etc. I have to write many clear notes, and store them in a place where future me will find the…

This is the reason one should always ask the LLM to create scripts to complete the task. Asking it to do things is fine, but as you stated you will forget. If you ask the LLM to do something, but always using a script first, and if you ask: 'Create a well documented shell script to ', you will have auto documentation. One could go one step further and ask it to create a documented terraform/ansible/whatever tooling setup you prefer.
Post reply on HN