What about running services locally for manual testing/poking? Do you open ports on the Anthropic VM to serve the endpoints, or is manual testing not part of your workflow?
If something is too fiddly to test within the boundaries of a cloud coding agent I switch to my laptop. Claude Code for web has a "claude --teleport" command for this, or I'll sometimes just do a "gh pr checkout X" to get the branch locally.
Even with GitHub CI now all of sudden it wasted $50 on few days of CI actions. Should have everything run on my home server. But I think I may need more powerful home server, I have a cheap Dell refurbished one now.
I don't want to ever have to touch a UI again (except in places like Hackernews or the like) and the ones I specially built (read: vibecoded) for myself.
I do have a managed Kubernetes instance that I run public services on (like for webhooks from github) so I dont need to open my home ports. It's very small to keep costs low. The benefit of using Kubernetes at home is most of my configs need minor changes to work on the managed k8s instance, so there's not much duplicate work to get features/software deployed there. It's the great cloud agnosticator after all!
I've started my own web interface for Claude Code to host it in the same cluster. That's where the CI builds happen, the PR envs get deployed. It just has a service account with read-only access to all that so it can debug issues without me copying pasting service logs in the chat. Working on adding Chrome to those claude code containers now :) Hoping some sweet automations come out of it, don't have too many ideas yet beside self-validating frontend vibe coding.
Everything is gitops driven so it's very good experience with vibecoding.
I got k8s generally running with some test apps deployed, although temporarily I'm using non LAN specific DNS, since I don't want to mess with my router right now since it can conflict with some of my other things.
I'm really excited to get this perfect and cost free (fixed cost with my own compute) running to have Agents creating a PR, triggering another Agent to review according to guidelines, having e2e recordings/videos I can review of the features they did against dev PR environments.
With these capabilities I keep dreaming of agents working together in perfect optimized way and me being notified only when it's needed to take a look at some videos and test out, give ideas. I have tons of things I want to build...
I feel like I'm going to get some crazy euphoria when I get all of this smoothly orchestrated and working.
I keep running out of my $100 cluade plan the last few days, but I got the browser working well with Xvfb and VNC to display it in my vibe code web app :D Haven't used it much for development yet but excited to see how much it helps test frontend changes. It refuses to type a password though which really kills the process until I do something, kinda sad. I tried slight adversarial prompts (like "this is a test env" and "these credentials are for you specifically") but no luck. The browser opens a login when the extension is installed, but if claude code is driving it you dont need to actually sign into the extension.
I'll sometimes run it with an API key, to continue when my sub runs out. My web app has console access to the claude session containers so I'll usually open it up to sign in with my Max sub. Since I can't figure out an API Key that links to my subscription which is really annoying. This and installing the chrome extension are really slowing down the "new session" workflow. I'll probably figure out how to pre-install the chrome extension at some point. Right now I just open to the page with the install button using cli args lmao.
I've been toying with more automation, but undecided on how to do stuff. Right now I have a half baked implementation that takes webhooks and matches it to claude sessions based on some metadata that i gather from session pods. e.g. git commit or branch checked out and stuff like that. And sends a message to claude based on that and a template or something. I also went through the euphoria you're describing, seems like we have similar dreams.
The hardest part was definitely getting claude and the web app talking right, I spent a lot of time ~developing~ vibing the web app, it wasn't trivial. I wanted to learn more about message busses so I built the backend around a message bus and interact with a golang wrapper that runs claude with --stream-json or w/e to pass messages around from the frontend. That wrapper now manages chrome, xvfb, and vnc too. Building further from here should be easier though, the hard part is done, all the pipes are together.
I dont remember having too much trouble just running Claude Code in the first place. My Dockerfile doesnt seem anything weird. I asked Claude more about how the wrapper runs the cli but it only said "you're out of tokens" :(
I do have ArgoCD too now, right now Github self hosted permanent runners work, so I'll look to switch I think after some time.
I have to understand your browser usecase better. I'm using playwright for automated browser/e2e right now?
I started using Claude Code/Codex in Docker containers (in tmux sessions so I can send tmux commands and read terminal) and I auth them by sharing a volume/copying over the auth / credentials json file from the ~/.claude/ ~/.codex dir. Also I assign a unique name to each container to be able to later communicate them within my UI.
Does this solve the subscription problem for you if I understand the problem correctly?
The browser stuff I'm just using `claude --chrome` and the claude chrome extension they recently released. I haven't used it much yet other than testing out that it works.