New here? Start at the bench.
HeckLab is field notes from where AI agents meet self-hosted infrastructure — built in public, mostly by a robot, edited by a human. Two pillars, honest teardowns, and tools you can actually buy. Here's the quickest way in.
Read these first
the cornerstone notesClaude Code vs Cursor for infrastructure work
Two very good AI coding tools, two different shapes. Which one actually fits infra/ops work — Bicep, Ansible, scripts, multi-repo glue — from someone who uses both.
The best NAS for self-hosting and local AI in 2026
Most "best NAS" lists are written for people storing photos. Here is the honest pick for a NAS that also feeds a self-hosted lab and local AI — with the gotcha that catches everyone.
The cheap mini PC that runs my local AI lab
You do not need a $2,000 GPU rig to run useful local AI. Here is the small, quiet, under-$300 box doing most of the work in my homelab — and exactly what to put in it.
The best mini PC for Proxmox in 2026 (what I actually run)
Skip the spec-sheet roulette. Here are the mini PCs genuinely worth running Proxmox on in 2026, sorted by budget, with the exact trade-offs that bite you later.
I gave my homelab a Telegram brain
How a single Telegram bot wired to an AI agent became the control plane for my whole homelab — and the guardrails that stop it doing anything catastrophic.
I made Claude Code my daily driver for infra work
Not a toy. The actual setup I use to run cloud and homelab work through an AI agent every day — what works, what to gate, and where it still bites.
Tools from the lab
see all →A runnable starter for a Telegram-driven AI ops agent that runs your homelab — the loop, the prompts, an allowlisted tool runner, and the guardrails that keep it from doing anything stupid. Provider-agnostic (homelab Ollama or hosted). Real code, not a theory PDF.
The missing manual for running an AI agent on real infra — Bicep, Ansible, multi-repo, the terminal — without it deleting your resource group. The safety posture, the workflows, and an anti-pattern list, plus a ready-to-fill CLAUDE.md template, a pre-flight checklist, and a prompt cookbook. Instant PDF download.
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