How to Build a Hardened 24/7 AI Agent Rig That Actually Stays Up

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Most developers running autonomous AI agents like Claude Code do so on personal laptops or basic VPS setups, which frequently fail due to power outages, memory leaks, or disk exhaustion. A hardened setup, by contrast, uses a dedicated host running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with Docker Compose, encrypted secrets, ZFS snapshots, and strict network hardening via UFW and fail2ban. The author describes running two such rigs — a physical Beelink SER5 Pro mini PC and a Hetzner cloud instance — both isolated from daily-use machines and accessible only via a private tailnet. Key reliability features include a systemd watchdog, a Redis-backed retry queue for API outages, and nightly memory compaction crons to prevent Claude Code session bloat. The author argues that treating an AI agent as production infrastructure, rather than a script, is the critical shift needed to keep it running reliably around the clock.

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