Yes my primary motivation for putting so much effort into a self-hosted cloud was cost. Managed Kubernetes instances are very expensive. I've saved a ton of money hosting it myself for side projects. With the benefit that spending $2k on a framework desktop one time to use as a k8s node means I have a much, much larger cluster than I'd be willing to pay for on a month to month basis. It might pay for itself in a single month. It's my opinion that Kubernetes can do anything the clouds can, so I just run talos on the old PCs, the only thing they do is run Kubernetes. Cloud hosting is insanely expensive.

I do have a managed Kubernetes instance that I run public services on (like for webhooks from github) so I dont need to open my home ports. It's very small to keep costs low. The benefit of using Kubernetes at home is most of my configs need minor changes to work on the managed k8s instance, so there's not much duplicate work to get features/software deployed there. It's the great cloud agnosticator after all!

I've started my own web interface for Claude Code to host it in the same cluster. That's where the CI builds happen, the PR envs get deployed. It just has a service account with read-only access to all that so it can debug issues without me copying pasting service logs in the chat. Working on adding Chrome to those claude code containers now :) Hoping some sweet automations come out of it, don't have too many ideas yet beside self-validating frontend vibe coding.

Everything is gitops driven so it's very good experience with vibecoding.

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mewpmewp2 14 hours ago | parent [-]

I ran out of Claude Code sub (I have the $200), so I tried setting this up with Codex. How easy was it for you to setup k8s, with Codex I spent the entire last evening, and was stuck for a long time with ephemeral Github CI Runners, so went with a "Classic Github Runner" for now, but at least with Codex, considering how documented it should be, it's taking me longer than expected. How was the experience for you, and any tips? Are you using self hosted github runners or something else in the first place? Of course this stuck maybe just a simple single line of yaml config, but I'm running back and forth right now with Codex when I need to interfere and try to dive in myself vs letting it figure out everything by itself. Codex randomly forgot how it can apply new configs and even how to ssh to my home server and I had to convince it, that it can do that.

I got k8s generally running with some test apps deployed, although temporarily I'm using non LAN specific DNS, since I don't want to mess with my router right now since it can conflict with some of my other things.

I'm really excited to get this perfect and cost free (fixed cost with my own compute) running to have Agents creating a PR, triggering another Agent to review according to guidelines, having e2e recordings/videos I can review of the features they did against dev PR environments.

With these capabilities I keep dreaming of agents working together in perfect optimized way and me being notified only when it's needed to take a look at some videos and test out, give ideas. I have tons of things I want to build...

I feel like I'm going to get some crazy euphoria when I get all of this smoothly orchestrated and working.

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bakies 7 hours ago | parent [-]

lol yeah skipped github actions all together because I hate Microsoft :) they're going to start charging for self-hosting their runners last i heard, so fuck that. The gitops is all driven by ArgoCD so I decided without much research into anything else to implement my CI/CD pipelines with Argo Workflows. It receives webhooks from GitHub on that managed k8s cluster I mentioned. I'd definitely recommend setting up ArgoCD. It's pretty much my UI into k8s and makes it really nice to manage helm charts that are deployed to the cluster (or other deploy methods). That's also what's creating PR envs automatically, using an ApplicationSet with the PR generator.

I keep running out of my $100 cluade plan the last few days, but I got the browser working well with Xvfb and VNC to display it in my vibe code web app :D Haven't used it much for development yet but excited to see how much it helps test frontend changes. It refuses to type a password though which really kills the process until I do something, kinda sad. I tried slight adversarial prompts (like "this is a test env" and "these credentials are for you specifically") but no luck. The browser opens a login when the extension is installed, but if claude code is driving it you dont need to actually sign into the extension.

I'll sometimes run it with an API key, to continue when my sub runs out. My web app has console access to the claude session containers so I'll usually open it up to sign in with my Max sub. Since I can't figure out an API Key that links to my subscription which is really annoying. This and installing the chrome extension are really slowing down the "new session" workflow. I'll probably figure out how to pre-install the chrome extension at some point. Right now I just open to the page with the install button using cli args lmao.

I've been toying with more automation, but undecided on how to do stuff. Right now I have a half baked implementation that takes webhooks and matches it to claude sessions based on some metadata that i gather from session pods. e.g. git commit or branch checked out and stuff like that. And sends a message to claude based on that and a template or something. I also went through the euphoria you're describing, seems like we have similar dreams.

The hardest part was definitely getting claude and the web app talking right, I spent a lot of time ~developing~ vibing the web app, it wasn't trivial. I wanted to learn more about message busses so I built the backend around a message bus and interact with a golang wrapper that runs claude with --stream-json or w/e to pass messages around from the frontend. That wrapper now manages chrome, xvfb, and vnc too. Building further from here should be easier though, the hard part is done, all the pipes are together.

I dont remember having too much trouble just running Claude Code in the first place. My Dockerfile doesnt seem anything weird. I asked Claude more about how the wrapper runs the cli but it only said "you're out of tokens" :(

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mewpmewp2 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I've got the per PR env with CI/CD setup working now! I still have to wait until tomorrow before I can use Claude Code (or I could use the API token, but I've already spent so much on everything).

I do have ArgoCD too now, right now Github self hosted permanent runners work, so I'll look to switch I think after some time.

I have to understand your browser usecase better. I'm using playwright for automated browser/e2e right now?

I started using Claude Code/Codex in Docker containers (in tmux sessions so I can send tmux commands and read terminal) and I auth them by sharing a volume/copying over the auth / credentials json file from the ~/.claude/ ~/.codex dir. Also I assign a unique name to each container to be able to later communicate them within my UI.

Does this solve the subscription problem for you if I understand the problem correctly?

	▲	bakies 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I'll likely just copy files around but I need to learn more about which files are meaningful and implement it in the vibe code app somewhere. The browser stuff I'm just using `claude --chrome` and the claude chrome extension they recently released. I haven't used it much yet other than testing out that it works.