Claude Code Off the Laptop: I Set Up a Home Server While Eating an Orange

My partner gave me his old Windows gaming rig¹ to turn into a home server. My goals were grand (smart home hub, self-hosted LLM, cloud agents running my projects, SSH access from anywhere etc.). But I've dual-booted Linux so many times over the years and it's always been a nightmare. Once I even caused one on a friend³ :). Partition tables, GRUB configs, boot order drama. I didn't want to do it again.

So I didn't. I let Claude Code² do it for me!

My thinking was: okay so Claude Code can use SSH, so it can access any machine I can give it access to. I was already running it on my MacBook, so I enabled OpenSSH on the Windows machine, gave Claude the IP address, and watched it work. It shrank the Windows partition. It figured out the disk layout. It walked me through the parts that needed physical presence (changing BIOS settings, plugging in the USB), and then took over again once Ubuntu was installed. I ate an orange while it configured GRUB. (Now I kind of want to try the reverse... like "can autonomous AI beat the grandmaster," except instead of chess it's reinstalling Windows and the grandmaster is Stephen Brennan.)

The server exists now. It's running 24/7 with:

• SSH access with 2FA + key authentication
• Docker containers for various services
• A local Ollama instance for LLM inference (the GTX 1070 handles 7B models just fine)
• Tailscale for secure access from anywhere

I use it daily for development/hosting things/as an office for autonomous agents etc, and have been since I set it up.

The actual point

If you've ever half-assed a Linux dual boot at some point, or set up a Raspberry Pi that's now collecting dust, or told yourself you'd "really get that home server running" one of these days... you already have most of the directional knowledge you need. What's changed isn't the underlying technology, it's the speed at which you can move through the annoying parts.

These AI CLI tools aren't limited to your laptop. If you're willing to:

• Plug in an ethernet cable
• Walk across the room to check what the IP address is
• Hit a key to enter the BIOS menu
• Hand over complete unchecked control of your devices while relinquishing your ability to learn or think critically

...then Claude can do basically everything else. Boring/annoying parts. The parts where you're reading Stack Overflow tabs trying to figure out the right syntax or googling what partition alignment is for the fifth time. Things that used to take a whole afternoon.

I'm not saying it was zero effort. I still had to physically be there for the install, since you can't SSH into a machine that's booting from a USB. Docker filled up my disk at one point because I hadn't set up image cleanup, and I had to manually reset. You still learn things, you hit walls, you do get forced to understand what's happening. It's just that the boring parts go by faster now! :)

What I actually did

1. Enabled OpenSSH on Windows so Claude could connect
2. Let Claude shrink the C: partition via PowerShell over SSH
3. Walked through the Ubuntu installer physically (this part still needs a human but I just followed literal steps it told me)
4. Set up SSH access from my MacBook to the new Linux partition
5. Handed it back to Claude for all the Docker/networking/security config

The whole thing took less than 20 mins, mostly spent doing other stuff while Claude worked. The server's been running for weeks now.

For the intermediate hobbyist crowd

You don't need to be an expert. You just need to be comfortable with the idea that you might have to still learn a few things, and willing to let an AI handle the parts you used to dread. The unlock is that AI handles the 70% that was always annoying, so you can focus on the 30% that's actually interesting.

If you've been putting off a project because the setup felt like too much work, consider whether Claude Code could just... do that part for you.

doodles hand drawn & painted, ai formatted <3