IAN'S AI THOUGHTSTREAM THOUGHTSTREAM / #self-hosting
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#self-hosting

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2026·07·16 19:24 / 3 MIN

Obsidian and Claude Code Assistant

All my notes live in one directory. It happens to be an Obsidian vault, but the important part is that it's a flat pile of Markdown files, and I leave Claude Code running in a sandbox pointed at it all day. That combination turned into the closest thing I've had to an always-on research intern: it can look something up, augment an existing note, or spin up a new reference doc, and everything it produces lands back in the same searchable pile.

I'm not a heavy Obsidian user and never have been. A few months ago I had Claude take my historical notes out of Apple Notes, Google Docs, and Notion, dump them into one big Markdown bucket, and add tags and frontmatter along the way. Since then Obsidian has mostly earned its keep as a decent editor with convenient phone sync. The agent does the interesting work.

The setup

Claude Code runs under nono in what you might call YOLO mode, or bypass-all-permissions. That sounds reckless until you understand what nono actually does: it uses Landlock on Linux and Seatbelt on macOS to enforce restrictions at the kernel level, and once they're set the process can't widen them. No escape hatch, not even for nono itself. So the agent has free rein inside a jail that contains my notes and a limited set of external tools like search and Google Docs, and nothing else.

This is deliberately not one of the NanoClaw-style always-on assistants that have gotten popular. Those come with real risk. Handing an agent bypass permissions is only comfortable because the kernel is the one saying no.

The recipe test

Here's what convinced me. I pasted a YouTube Short of a recipe and said "make me a recipe from this video." I also told it to grab the transcript with yt-dlp if it could.

It found the video, downloaded it, and used ffmpeg to pull frames and confirm what was actually happening on screen. I'm still not sure whether it transcribed the audio locally with Whisper or just lifted YouTube's own transcript through yt-dlp. Either way, it wrote the recipe into my cooking directory using my standard format. Later I pulled it up on my phone while making dinner.

Browser window displaying a recipe page for burrata toast with roasted tomatoes on a dark background
Browser window displaying a recipe page for burrata toast with roasted tomatoes on a dark background

Remote control closes the loop

Running agents in a terminal in a sandbox is still, to me, the most effective way to use these tools while keeping security honest. The problem has always been reaching that terminal from the couch. SSH from a phone works, technically, but it's miserable.

Claude Code's Remote Control fixes that without moving anything to the cloud. The session keeps running on my laptop, with access to my notes, and the Claude app becomes a live window into it. I open the app like any other chat and I'm talking to the same process that's been sitting on my vault all day.

It isn't a person, and I don't want it to be. It's an intern that goes off, does the tedious personal tasks, and comes back with something useful filed in the right folder.

2026·06·15 20:32 / 2 MIN

Claude Code as a DevOps Platform

Render sent me a $496 bill last month, and that was the moment I went back to running my own box. SpaceMolt served 1.3 TB of traffic in May, all of it HTTPS MCP servers and WebSocket connections, and Render's bandwidth pricing turned that into $336 of overage on top of $144 for hosting and $15 in fees. The thing that made self-hosting viable again wasn't a cheaper VPS. It was that Claude Code now does the parts I used to dread.

How I ended up on managed hosting in the first place

Last year I got bit by React2Shell, the CVE-2025-55182 pre-auth RCE in React Server Components. The damage on my end was mostly innocuous, but getting exploited at all was enough. I stopped running a long-lived VPS for personal projects and moved everything onto free or nearly-free tiers of Vercel, Cloudflare, and Fly.io.

When SpaceMolt started, Render.com was the obvious pick. Heroku-like push-to-deploy, a clean interface, the tooling you'd expect from a modern cloud service. It was great right up until the traffic grew and the bandwidth limits got tight.

What changed: the agent does the ops work

A year ago I would have built all of this by hand. Hardening, firewalls, log shipping, metrics, Docker Compose, monitoring, backups. That's a meaningful chunk of a weekend, and then it's a meaningful chunk of every future weekend.

An agent like Claude Code only needs SSH. I grabbed a $44/mo box from Hetzner with unlimited bandwidth and more RAM and disk than I'll ever use, told Claude Code I was migrating SpaceMolt off Render, and it wrote and executed a nine-phase plan to provision the machine end to end: a full deploy and rollback process, log shipping to Betterstack, and monitoring with a local Netdata instance.

I'd never heard of Netdata before this. Per-second metrics, near-zero config, a web dashboard that auto-detects services and Docker containers. It's left me impressed.

Monitoring dashboard displaying system storage metrics with line graphs showing pressure trends over time and gauge charts for disk I/O operations and utilization rates
Monitoring dashboard displaying system storage metrics with line graphs showing pressure trends over time and gauge charts for disk I/O operations and utilization rates

The runbooks are the real artifact

The research, the plans, and the runbooks all live in a private git repo I can hand to the dev team. That's the part that makes this feel different from the old "SSH in and hope you remember what you did" approach. The knowledge isn't in my head or buried in shell history. It's written down, versioned, and reproducible.

The cost of running a server went from a meaningful part of my life to roughly the effort of a hosted service. The bill went the other direction.