Can the same thing be said for using docker compose etc on a VPS to host a web app? Ie you can get the ergonomic / ease of using Fly, Renderer?

Historically, managed platforms like Fly.io, Render, and DigitalOcean App Platform existed to solve three pain points: 1. Fear of misconfiguring Linux 2. Fear of Docker / Compose complexity 3. Fear of “what if it breaks at 2am?”

CLI agents (Claude Code, etc.) dramatically reduce (1) and (2), and partially reduce (3).

So the tradeoff has changed from:

“Pay $50–150/month to avoid yak-shaving” → “Pay $5–12/month and let an agent do the yak-shaving”

I feel the same way. I now have around 7 projects hosted on a home server with Coolify + Cloudflare. Always worry about security and I have seen many posts related to self hosting on HN trending recently

And if you prefer to learn well how to do it without AI, you can always try to do it manually the old way but then use AI at the end to review your config and spot any security issues

As an added bonus you could add on a mobile-first claude code UI on top of claude. I've been working on this and use it on my pi5 at home. https://yepanywhere.com/

(and no, this product is not against TOS as it is using the official claude code SDK unlike opencode https://yepanywhere.com/tos-compliance.html)

Vibe-setting up a home network server with VaultWarden is beyond reckless. LLMs have tendency to overlook security in order to get things working. You are, thereby, exposing your passwords (and potentially your 2FA as bitwarden supports that) to the whole world. This is beyond stupid. Even before LLMs my main concern with setting up BitWarden on my own server was two folds: security and availability. LLMs doesn't fix the second point but they make the first point much worse.

Others here mention Coolify for a homeserver. If you're looking for turnkey docker-compose based apps rather than just framework/runtime environments, I will recommend the runtipi project. I have found it to be simple and flexible. It offers an 'app store' like interface, and supports hosting your own app store. It manages certs and reverse proxy via traefik as well.

https://runtipi.io/

Nice. This is a great start. The next steps are backups and regular security updates. The former is probably pretty easy with Claude and a provider like Backblaze, for updates I wonder if "check for security issues with my software and update anything in need" will work well (and most importantly, how consistently). Alternatively, getting the AI to threat model and perform any docker hardening measures.

Then someday we self-host the AI itself, and it all comes together.

Love this. I run also all my stuff by myself and I’m not an infra expert by all means just know enough to self host my app and services. I also built an remote monitoring agent using Go and rails I call it https://bareagent.io which monitors servers, docker containers and sends notifications when in any of those containers an error occurres as it is attached to the container logs

Impeccable timing, I finally got around to putting some old hardware to use and getting a home assistant instance (and jellyfin, and immich, and nextcloud, ...) set up over winter break. Claude (and tailscale) saved hours of my time and enabled me to build enough momentum to get things configured. It's now feasible for me to spend 15-20 minutes knocking down homeserver tasks that I otherwise would've ignored. Quite fun!