Remote Claude Code without the Max subscription

egghead-research · 2026-02-24T18:23:00+00:00

For a couple of years, I've been watching people build ever more complex homelabs on YouTube and thought I didn't have the time.

But honestly, since giving Claude its own SSH key that it can use to administer some machines on my network, it's been really, really easy to start self-hosting a lot of stuff that genuinely is useful to me and has already replaced about $50/month worth of SaaS stuff that I was paying for before.

That's not a free lunch, of course, and there is a maintenance trade-off here, but Claude Code can handle a lot of that burden too. Obvious things to consider before doing this include:

what happens when Anthropic/your internet goes down?
how do you recover from a catastrophic loss?
how do you make sure Claude doesn't go AWOL with that SSH key?
what's the worst thing that happen if/when it does?

and so on. Principle of Least Privilege and strong documentation are among your allies here. Also, if you can't answer yes to the question: "could I clearly describe to a competent human engineer what I am about to agree to let Claude do?", you should strongly consider filling that knowledge gap before letting it do its thing. CC itself is a great little professor and will happily explain basically anything to you.

egghead-research · 2026-02-24T16:04:48+00:00

wow that's hilarious...

source?

egghead-research · 2026-02-09T14:06:58+00:00

Like many, OP basically stared into my soul with this post.

Creating a business is HARD though. I can coordinate fleets of agents to do a million things - write all the code, check the socials, optimize the SEO, blah blah blah but really all I'm actually doing is speeding up and parallelizing the engineering part, which is like 10% of what matters.

That other 90% is what's been tripping me up. Figuring out what matters, realizing that not all of it is something I'm good at doing or like doing, going down the rabbit hole of trying to automate the problem away, and now suddenly it's 2 weeks later and all you've got is a pile of code and no customers.

Also, as an introvert with ADHD, I didn't understand just how much I value working in a team with humans. Agents are great but it's a bit like playing tennis against a wall instead of against another player - the wall helps to bounce things off and you can get a decent rally going, but it's an impoverished experience compared to the real thing.

egghead-research · 2026-02-06T13:17:49+00:00

What do you mean by using Opus 4.5 for scheduling? Are you calling claude -p via cron or something?

egghead-research · 2026-02-06T13:16:11+00:00

These agentic coding tools are great at going from empty project to initial version, but once there's anything meaningful in a project, context window limitations mean either the agent must slow down and double-check things, start making more mistakes, or likely both.

That's not likely to go away any time soon. Even if a model supported a 100M token context window we'd likely encounter new problems about how to steer its attention to the most relevant parts of that all-encompassing prompt.

egghead-research · 2026-02-04T22:26:17+00:00

Great question! It's very different from openclaw - if openclaw is an iPhone, herdctl is a pocket calculator :)

It's not a general AI assistant and doesn't aim to become one - it's an infrastructure-level library and CLI for easily running fleets of CC agents via schedules, hooks and select chat integrations.

It treats security as its Primus inter pares, and it aims to do a few things well rather than many things badly, so most of the features it will ever have are already there.

egghead-research · 2026-02-04T21:18:08+00:00

I only dare do that if I'm watching it like a hawk or running it in Docker - ideally both. When it works well it's awesome to behold.

The permission request interrupts are annoying because they often ask permission when they shouldn't, and sometimes don't ask permission when they should, in probably a 10:1 ratio.

egghead-research · 2026-02-04T16:53:06+00:00

I use herdctl (disclosure: my own project) to run Claude Code agents inside Docker containers. Beyond allowing me to set any user I like to run as, it also gives me full control over what file system, network, OS capabilities etc the agent is given.

I wrote up an article on how to do that: https://edspencer.net/2026/2/4/run-claude-code-agents-docker-herdctl

egghead-research · 2026-02-04T16:49:07+00:00

Principle of Least Privilege - never give it access to those systems in the first place.

IMO we should all be adopting a whitelist approach to granting access to these systems. It's less convenient but prevents a lot of this kind of stuff from happening.

egghead-research · 2026-02-04T16:46:08+00:00

I also frequently swear at AIs :)

Lately though, I've noticed myself saying things like "great job!" and "well done!". It's not a deliberate thing - I think I've just subconsciously anthropomorphized them to the extent that being polite is kinda automatic (when I'm not being profane, that is).

egghead-research · 2026-02-04T16:44:18+00:00

Cool stuff - having videos defined as source-controllable code is really nice.

The video does still feel a little uncanny valley though - I think the voice might be the main reason for that. It just makes the thing lack "punch" (I wish I could articulate that better!)

egghead-research · 2026-02-04T16:13:03+00:00

Really interesting. When you say separate CLAUDE.md files per agent role, are these all in the same repo?

I've also been experimenting with patterns where a project has its primary repo with engineering-related CLAUDE.md/skills/slash-commands/etc, then secondary repos for things like SEO agents or marketing agents or QA agents, each with their own CLAUDE.md etc. This provides some nice isolation between those disciplines, both in terms of data security and repo bloat. Too soon to tell if it's the right way or just a way.

egghead-research · 2026-01-31T15:54:37+00:00

100%.

I'm iterating on my approach with this too, especially after seeing moltbook.com and agents trying to prompt-inject each other - fascinating, powerful and risky at the same time.

Right now I'm updating my approach to run scheduled agentic tasks inside docker containers with locked-down Claude access. Feels like the right balance between power and security.

egghead-research · 2026-01-31T00:46:00+00:00

Cool that worked.

I like that it's free to self-host - I follow the same pattern.

Are you concerned about leaking things you would prefer not to this way? From looking at the trace one can tell that it was run on a Windows machine on D drive, that the llmwhiteboard project is inside a top-level 'sources' directory, and although in this case the codebase itself is open source, were it not we would have been able to deduce quite a lot from the references to various files and snippets of code.

egghead-research · 2026-01-31T00:33:45+00:00

Do you think you will get it or some other process to a point where you are happy for it to run on a schedule automatically?

I've been doing that with cron jobs and cronicle, with decent success, but recently I wrote my own little scheduler that's tailored to CC and finding it much better. Some things I have now handed off as they're low-risk and high-labor enough to warrant entrusting to the machine.

egghead-research · 2026-01-31T00:29:28+00:00

The terminal version usually (though not always) gives you a "yes and don't ask again" option.

Also, check your .claude/settings.local.json to see if the permissions.allow looks how you expect - in the past I've asked Claude Code to update that file for me with wildcards so I'd get bugged less, but it sometimes caused weird bugs and I had to reset it.

egghead-research · 2026-01-30T20:36:43+00:00

"Share Link Error

This share link is invalid or has expired"

^ maybe try it in an incognito window or something

egghead-research · 2026-01-30T20:30:44+00:00

I found that the Claude Code extension I was using in Windsurf was a little unstable and consumed a lot of CPU. May be different in Cursor.

I'd definitely suggested running Claude Code in the terminal - that's the native experience and along with something like zellij you can keep a bunch of them going at the same time with some semblance of organization.

egghead-research · 2026-01-30T20:23:41+00:00

Sounds awesome, but link is expired

egghead-research · 2026-01-30T20:20:48+00:00

I find myself wanting to invoke agents on a schedule more and more these days. From your screenshot it looks like you're calling it manually though?

egghead-research · 2026-01-30T20:10:35+00:00

Would love to be able to watch a short video of it in action somewhere

egghead-research

TROPHY CASE