Minilab

Mission briefing, day zero. One unboxed mini PC. One blank USB stick. One empty slot in the fleet. By end of day this machine must be installed, hardened, answering on the mesh, and able to survive a power cut with nobody home. You have met this node twice already: in Ghost Protocol it ran coding agents around the clock, in Pocket Protocol it took orders from a phone while queuing at the registry office. You have never seen it born. Until now. ...

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: the agents are running in the lab, three rooms and one network hop away, and you are standing in a queue with a phone in your hand. The work cannot wait for you to sit back down. The approval blocking it is one tap away. The agent will hold the line until somebody answers, and the somebody is you. I already moved my coding agents off the laptop, in Ghost Protocol . They run on an always-on box in the lab now, unattended, writing code at 3am while the laptop lid is shut. That solved the compute problem and left a smaller, dumber one in its place: the console was still in the lab. ...

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: the agents working your codebase don’t stop when you close the laptop lid. They can’t. Hand the operation to a machine that never sleeps, never closes, and never goes dark mid-run. This message will not self-destruct. Neither will the pipeline running at 3am without you. The Job Changed Underneath the Laptop For years the case for getting off the laptop was personal inconvenience: the battery hits 3% mid-refactor, it’s asleep in the other room when the fix finally clicks, one spilled coffee away from a very bad afternoon. Real problems, but survivable ones. Commit often, back it up, hope for the best. ...

Good morning, Agent. You’ve been running Docker inside LXC containers on Proxmox for over a year now. Seven containers. Seven little fortresses, each housing its own Docker Compose stack. Immich, Frigate, Jellyfin, the Arr empire. Clean separation. Independent backups. Feels right. Then someone drops a Reddit thread in your lap: “Docker in LXC is an antipattern.” Time to audit the operation. The Setup Under Scrutiny Here’s how the Minilab is architected. Every service gets its own LXC container on Proxmox, and inside each one, Docker runs the actual application: ...

You’re deep in a deploy. Terminal open. Three SSH sessions. A PR review half-done. Then your partner texts: “Did you leave the heater on at Ragusa?” You could switch to the browser. Find the bookmark. Wait for Home Assistant to load. Navigate to the right entity. Check. Switch back to the terminal. Lose your place in the diff. Or you could just ask. I manage two houses. Two Home Assistant instances. Dozens of entities spread across two sites connected by Tailscale. For months, the friction was constant: browser tabs, bookmarked URLs, different tokens, the cognitive tax of context-switching between code and home. ...