Real-world
Homelab ops
Concrete workflows, including the tradeoffs and limitations reported by their authors.
this collection
Website fixes, research, and Linux maintenance on Strix Halo and DGX Spark
Beyond the obvious coding use case, this setup handles website debugging, deep web research, and day-to-day Linux server maintenance.
A homelab dashboard and desktop cleanup, vibe-coded with Pi
Qwen 27B and the Pi coding agent built a custom chat UI, an mp3 server, and a homelab control panel — and did the desktop tidy-up that first proved the setup was worth keeping.
Migrating an agent between machines over text message
Using Hermes to patch DeepSeek to a vision release and then move the whole agent, containers, and environment to another computer — remotely, from a phone.
Local coding for a homelab app, with ChatGPT as the second reviewer
Qwen3-Coder through Cline writes the app; a paid ChatGPT Plus subscription reviews the prompts and the output before it ships.
Zero cloud usage since getting a Strix Halo — almost
DevOps work, smart-home control, and paperwork all moved off the cloud once Strix Halo hardware arrived — with one exception the poster caught themselves forgetting.
A sub-10GB model as the brain behind Home Assistant
One small model does double duty: correcting speech-to-text output and acting as the decision-making 'brain' for home automation triggers.
A daily-refreshed RAG advisor built from your own infrastructure
A Python collector pulls read-only configs, firewall rules, and network health data every day and feeds it into a local RAG pipeline, so the advisor always knows the current state of the homelab without ever being able to touch it.
'Add this app to my cluster' — and it just does it
Hermes on Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B runs this person's entire homelab k3s cluster hands-off, including diagnosing a flaky network cable before it was told to.
Agents running well on an old Intel PC with no dedicated GPU
Countering a cost complaint elsewhere in the thread, this person runs agents on genuinely low-spec, CPU-only hardware and reports about 30 cents of electricity for a full day.