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Comment by trollbridge | Hacker News Reader

Not to dismiss this, but when I was working on a problem on Windows recently my LLM (6.1 Sol / oh-my-pi) ended up doing the same thing, although it used Qemu and snapshots to accomplish that.

Eventually it got to a point it could iterate very quickly and was really only constrained by total system RAM which meant a dozen at most copies could be running simultaneously.

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Same. It's quite remarkable. Two other things Claude and I have done. I have a spare workstation running proxmox in my garage. Claude can now create, snapshot, delete, extend, start, and restart vms. It's been great. I also have skills that allow it to spin up spot instances when I need to test things that rely on hardware I don't have like certain Nvidia gpus or 100gb networking. What a time to be alive.

To be fair, you never needed LLMs to be able to do all that.

True but it was a whole bunch of fragile scripts/functions with lots of ifs. I'll give you a real world example of what's different. Agent spins up a VM to run a build on windows. During the build it realizes it's out of disk space. Agent resizes disk on demand. Build finishes and it launches the app. Runs some tests and realizes it's cpu and memory constrained. Adjust the cpu and memory and runs new tests. tears it down and sends the perf logs back to me. Or it looks at system resources and decides what other vms it can pause while it runs the tests and then turns them back on after.

There are so many unknowns and the ability for the agents to dynamically adjust and make decisions allows for some really powerful autonomous workflows.

Not sure the lower bounds of CPU/memory/disk space that your project needs should be considered "so many unknowns".

Man. HN is brutal. Just one example. And yes, when you're looping agents and builds to identify performance optimizations and build features sometimes you don't know what those bounds are going to be and it's much faster to let the agents work it out, update their learnings, and keep building.

To be fair, often you have good ideas, but not enough time. I have had a lot of fun having Qwen3.8 27b running at home, having it explore and implement ideas that was way to ambitious for the time I had available to tinker with Home Assistant and Proxmox. It is an enabler and can also be a good tutor, when used as such. I have learned a lot.

"be able" implying capability rather than time constraints and opportunity cost which is what most people on here refer to when they mention something cool they're doing with LLMs that they weren't doing before.

Not to take your credit away but there is something called automation, scripting, etc.

All those actions within my homelab are automated via Ansible and bash scripts (I only run Linux), I am only notified if something goes wrong like a backup failed.

I get it if you never worked in IT, that is fine, but you need zero AI to get the above fully automated.

Does Claude keep versioning of the changes?? I host my own repos via Forgejo, Ansible and the automation process consume the config files from there, one source of truth. If my whole setup burns with fire, I can bring everything back online from the offsite Ansible playbook located at Codeberg.

Why not both? My entire home network (dns, zfs nas, subnets, kube, proxmox hosts, ipa domain, its overkill homeprod) is represented by a git repo. Docs, plans, scripts to bootstrap nodes to domain join, kube config, proxmox tooling, ipa as code, nas as code, cert management, my own ec2 as a service, etc. Making changes is done via a mix of one off tooling, ansible and terraform.

I use Claude or codex to manage the entire thing, interchangeably. They keep detailed daily journals. They keep a central TODO.md up to date. They refresh stale docs or stale plans when new plans invalidate old decisions.

I have so many layers of backups and fail safes that I work entirely in yolo mode. It’s really insane what I’ve been able to deploy myself on nights and weekends. Stuff I’ve wanted to tackle for years but never got around to it.

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