A few weeks ago I got a little obsessed with what I could actually build with an AI coding agent. I use the tools at work for docs and analysis but not so much coding. I pull things apart more than build new stuff.
I started with little projects: first fixing some annoyances with my website theme. Then that turned into creating a SmugMug plugin. Then, making the “About Me” plugin to replace my Linktree. It just… got out of hand really fast.
Then came the dreaded credit limits. I started looking at local AI agents: AI tools running on my own computers as a way to keep working around usage limits, so ChatGPT and I started to brainstorm. I already ran my own media server at home and have an obnoxious amount of storage; but I hadn’t really run anything significant at home since I moved back from Denver.
Enter my old home lab. I had to blow the dust off of it as the virtual cluster machines (Proxmox) had been dead for almost two years. I had snagged some replacement motherboards off eBay and just left them in the box and never fixed them. Oops.
Procrastination strikes again
Proxmox lets one physical computer run several virtual computers, each with its own operating system and applications. It’s useful when you want to run a bunch of services or experiment without dedicating a whole machine to every idea. I had two of them with shared storage, and the amount of work it took to repair just never seemed appealing. We were moving, planning our wedding and honeymoon, going to the beach.. anything sounded more fun than sitting in a closet all weekend.
But now I had a reason. I could reuse some or all of this hardware to build out a local AI agent ecosystem AND begin to build an AI personal assistant to run our house. And once it’s up and running with monitoring – things like software updates and network congestion are an AI agent’s problem, not mine.
It’s the little things
So starting last weekend, I rolled up my metaphorical sleeves and got to work. Before tackling the Proxmox machines, I started with the three Intel NUCs. These are the little computers running our Plex media server, the media utility services, and the box I call Chatty, the monitoring system.
All three are now upgraded to Ubuntu 26 and back online.
Along the way, I discovered I’d lost the Plex machine’s login password. Naturally, the machine I wanted to use as a reference for the existing storage setup was the one I couldn’t get into.
That led to an evening of trying to catch the boot menu, landing at a GRUB prompt, throwing out random kernel commands, and eventually booting straight into Ubuntu when that was exactly what I was trying to avoid. The keyboard-and-monitor switch in between wasn’t helping either. Plex is recovered now, but it was a pretty good reminder of what happens when a setup sits long untouched. Password managers only going forward.
Computers, Assemble!
With the NUCs moving along, I ordered new power supplies, drives, and cases for the Proxmox hosts. If I was going to replace the motherboards, I wasn’t going to yank out all the internals, replace the motherboard, and put it all back. Best to start fresh in a new case and migrate over the parts I wanted.
So the motherboards finally came out of their boxes, and the office floor became a computer assembly area. Cases, cables, loose screws.. the usual. I had managed to avoid this project for almost two years, and now there were computer parts all over the place. For a week. Apparently I just needed a sufficiently interesting excuse.
Today I finished bringing the first Proxmox host back online.
Finally.
I also confirmed GPU passthrough, which lets my machine use the graphics card directly instead of treating it as just another virtual piece of hardware. That gives me another place to run local AI workloads down the road instead of a single central AI host.
The second host still needs work, but I now have one working Proxmox machine and all three NUCs upgraded and back online. Plex is recovered, MediaUtility is ready for the next round of setup, and Chatty is back to being useful. The lab is starting to look like somewhere I can actually run things again.
Now to give it something to do
While all this hardware work has been going on, ChatGPT and I have also been working to define a collection of AI agents. There’s a lot more to come on that in part 2. I started out wanting help writing some code and now I’m figuring out which machines the agents are going to live on. It snowballed a wee bit.
One of the first ones will be Mechanic, which is being built to help look after the lab. We’re starting with the media services: setting them up, connecting them to storage, and checking for things like missing network drives or a disk that’s about to fill up. The groundwork is there, but getting it running against my actual setup is still ahead.
Next up is finishing the second Proxmox host and getting Mechanic running on the media utility NUC. Plenty to keep me busy as we get into winter and less beach friendly weather.
So that’s part one. A couple of website annoyances turned into plugins, the plugins turned into more projects, and the credit limits somehow turned into new computer cases arriving at the house.
At least those eBay motherboards are finally off the shelf.
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