Posted by websku 1/11/2026
If you have your own agent, then it can talk to whatever you want - could be OpenRouter configured to some free model, or could be to a local model too. If the local model wasn't knowledgeable enough for sysadmin you could perhaps use installable skills (scripts/programs) for sysadmin tasks, with those having been written by a more powerful model/agent.
What’s the goal? If the act of _building_ a homelab is the fun then i agree 100%. If _having_ a reliable homelab that the family can enjoy is the goal, then this doesn’t matter.
For me personally, my focus is on “shipping” something reliable with little fuss. Most of my homelab skills don’t translate to my day job anyway. My homelab has a few docker compose stacks, whereas at work we have an internal platform team that lets me easily deploy a service on K8s. The only overlap here is docker lol. Manually tinkering with ports and firewall rules, using sqlite, backups with rsync, etc…all irrelevant if you’re working with AWS from 9-5.
I guess I’m just pointing out that some people want to build it and move on.
I'll agree to disagree on it not being applicable. Having fundamental knowledge on topics like networking thru homelabbing have helped me develop my understanding from the ground up. It helps in ways that are not always obvious. But if your goal is purely to be better at your job at work, it is not the most efficient path.
Enlightenment here comes when you realize others are doing the exact same thing with the exact same justification, and everyone's pain/reward threshold is different. The argument you are making justifies their usage as well as yours.
In that case, it's not about the 'joy of creation', but actually getting everything up and running again, in which case LLMs are indispensable.
From to time, test the restore process.
They tend to slip out of declarative mode and start making untracked changes to the system from time to time.
>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 are not understand how things work and where everything goes.
This post could be written or at least modified by an LLM, but more importantly I think this person is completely missing the point of self hosting and learning.
I did it! Except you didn't and you don't know anything about what it did or learned anything along the way. Success?
But for what i'm using Agents right now, claude code is the tool to go.
workdir/ ├── README.md ├── CLAUDE.md # Claude Code instructions ├── BACKUP.md # Backup documentation ├── .gitignore ├── traefik/ │ ├── docker-compose.yml │ └── config/ │ └── traefik.yml ├── authentik/ │ ├── docker-compose.yml │ └── .env.example ├── umami/ │ ├── docker-compose.yml │ └── .env.example ├── n8n/ │ ├── docker-compose.yml │ └── .env.example └── backup/ ├── backup.sh # Automated backup script ├── restore.sh # Restore from backup ├── verify.sh # Verify backup integrity ├── list-backups.sh # List available backups └── .env.example
We've gone a step further, and made this even easier with https://zo.computer
You get a server, and a lot of useful built-in functionality (like the ability to text with your server)
I agree you could use LLMs to learn how it works, but given that they explain and do the actions, I suspect the vast majority aren't learning anything. I've helped students who are learning to code, and very often they just copy/paste back and forth and ignore the actual content.
And I find the stuff that the average self hoster needs is so surface level that LLMs flawlessly provide solutions.
If you're self hosting for other reasons then that's fine. I self host media for various reasons, but I also give all my email/calendar/docs/photos over to a big tech company because I'm not motivated by that aspect.
They also aren't seeing any of your sensitive data being hosted on the server. At least the way I use them is getting suggestions for what software and configs I should go with, and then I do the actual doing. Which means I'm becoming independently more capable than I was before.
I'm asking Claude technical questions about setup, e.g., read this manual, that I have skimmed but don't necessarily fully understand yet. How do I monitor this service? Oh connect Tailscale and manage with ACLs. But what do I do when it doesn't work or goes down? Ask Claude.
To get more accurate setup and diagnostics, I need to share config files, firewall rules, IPv6 GUAs, Tailscale ACLs... and Claude just eats it up, and now Anthropic knows it forever too. Sure, CGNET, Wireguard, and ssh logins stand between us, but... Claude is running a terminal window on a LAN device next to another terminal window that does have access to my server. Do I trust VS Code? Anthropic? The FOSS? Is this really self-hosting? Ahh, but I am learning stuff, right?
Tbh I did the mistake of throwing away Ansible, so testing my setup was a pain!
Since with AI, the focus should be on testing, perhaps it's sensible to drop Ansible for something like https://github.com/goss-org/goss
Things are happening so fast, I was impressed to see a Linux distro embrace using a SKILL.md! https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/default/omar...