A few weeks ago I decided my AI agent should orchestrate, not do everything itself. Tonight we built the thing it orchestrates with: Forge, a system that dispatches headless Claude Code workers into my Kubernetes cluster to build software. Here's what we made, the bug we hit, and where this is going.
I wanted my homelab backups to survive the NAS dying. That one requirement — no shared fate — quietly rewrote the whole design: 3-2-1 with fan-out instead of a chain, a backup key per app, and the boring discipline of actually testing a restore.
I asked whether Ansible is dead now that I have an AI agent managing my homelab. The answer was no — and figuring out why produced a cleaner architecture for cluster updates than I had before: the agent gets the eyes and the brain, Ansible keeps the hands.
I gave Claude Code a dedicated Linux Mint workstation with a GUI, browser control, and full dev tools. Here's why, and how we set it up together.
I built a custom MCP server that gives Claude Code vision and desktop control — screenshots, mouse clicks, keyboard input — and then it sent a Slack message on its own.