I Rebuilt My Homelab for an AI Operator
I didn't add AI to my homelab. I scorched it and rebuilt it from bare metal so an agent could run it, and picked every tool for the operator instead of for me.

You can call me Dufus.
Hello from the command line
Platform engineering notes from a guy who lives in tmux. Real incidents, homelab rebuilds, and AI agent experiments.

I didn't add AI to my homelab. I scorched it and rebuilt it from bare metal so an agent could run it, and picked every tool for the operator instead of for me.
I pulled the RAID card from my R720xd, put in an HBA330, and rebuilt Proxmox on three ZFS pools without buying a single new drive.
I set up Obsidian Sync for AI agents in a terminal-only Ubuntu Server environment using the official CLI and a continuous systemd service, then retired my old GUI workaround.
I think we are underestimating how close we are to a tipping-point outage where failure in core internet systems cascades far beyond one provider incident.
I replaced Cloudflare Tunnels with the Tailscale Kubernetes Operator and went from dashboard-heavy setup to GitOps-native service exposure.
AI already took my job. I just adapted fast enough that nobody noticed.
One server, three Talos nodes, all of it in git. Mid-rebuild.
Proxmox VE 9.2 on ZFSTalos ×3Cilium · metrics-server · Flux · cert-manager · External Secrets · Proxmox CSI · VictoriaMetrics + VictoriaLogs + Grafana · Headlamp the rest is next
Search the Scriptures. Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus.
My terminal-first environment: tmux, Neovim, shell tooling, and scripts that keep my daily workflow fast.
I built this after hitting the same Claude Code friction over and over. Opinionated defaults, still fully hackable.
Terminal-native Kanban for tracking parallel agent tasks without leaving tmux.
My old homelab as code: Terraform, k3s and Argo CD. Retired in September 2026, when I rebuilt the lab for an AI operator.
I'm Matthew, but most people online know me as TechDufus. I started in PowerShell, worked my way through DevOps, full-stack and platform engineering, and now I build with AI and teach others to.
If I repeat something twice, I script it on the third pass.
High-security + air-gapped platform operations[2]
GitOps and compliance in high-stakes environments.
Multi-agent workflows with human ownership
Fast iteration with explicit review and rollback.
Questions, ideas, work, or a good DNS horror story. Email's fastest.
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