I have found Claude Code is a great help to me. Yes, I can and have tinkered a lot over the decades, but I am perfectly happy letting Claude drive the system administration, and advise on best practices. Certainly for prototype configurations. I can install CC on all VPSes and local machines. NixOS sounds great, but the learning curve is not fun. I installed the CC package from the NixOS unstable channel and I don't have to learn the funky NixOS packaging language. I do have to intervene sometimes as the commands go by, as I know how to drive, so maybe not a solution for true newbies. I can spend a few hours learning how to click around in one of the cloud consoles, or I can let CC install the command line interfaces and do it for me. The $20/mo plan is plenty for system administration and if I pick the haiku model, then CC runs twice as fast on trivial stuff like system administration.

Cloud is not great for GPU workloads. I run a nightly workload that takes 6-8 hours to run and requires a Nvidia GPU, along with high RAM and CPU requirements. It can't be interrupted. It has a 100GB output and stores 6 nightly versions of that. That's easily $600+ a month in AWS just for that one task. By self-hosting it I have access to the GPU all the time for a fixed up front relatively low cost and can also use the HW for other things (I do). That said, these are all backend / development type resources, self hosting customer facing or critical things yourself is a different prospect, and I do use cloud for those types of workloads. RDS + EKS for a couple hundred a month is an amazing deal for what is essentially zero maintenance application hosting. My point is that "literally anything else" is extreme, as always, it is "right tool for the job".

It doesnt make any sense to you that I would like to avoid a potential 60K bill because of a configuration error? If youre not working at faang your employer likely cares too. Especially if its your own business you would care. You really can't think of _one_ case where self hosting makes any sense?

> For a tinkerer who's focused on the infra, then sure, hosting your own can make sense.

... or for a big company. I've worked at companies with thousands of developers, and it's all been 'self hosted'. In DCs, so not rinky dink, but yes, and there's a lot of advantages to doing it this way. If you set it up right, it can be much easier for developers to use than AWS.