Case Study — The Nuclide Homelab, built with Claude

Origin story

One Saturday, the owner's wife left him home alone. He got bored, subscribed to Claude, and started tinkering with a home server. That afternoon of boredom turned into the /opt/stacks ecosystem documented here — a ~66-container, ~23-stack self-hosted platform with SSO, an MCP/agent gateway, GPU offload, and a fully audited network. This is that story, kept as a record of what a curiosity-driven collaboration produced.

This is a personal passion project, not a work deliverable. The tone and scope reflect that: depth and exploration over minimum-viable.

What was built (high level)

AI/agent core — LiteLLM model gateway (~28 curated models), an MCP gateway that DinD-spawns and OAuth-gates MCP servers, an Agent Operator (cron/event agents), semantic tool retrieval, MCP→LobeChat registration.
Identity — PocketID as the universal OIDC IdP; every service behind SSO (LiteLLM, LobeChat, n8n, Nextcloud, Daytona via a Keycloak→PocketID adapter).
Data layer — shared-postgres standard; a full tier-1 "no SQLite on NFS" migration (ntfy, Karakeep, Arcane, traccar → local disk; Memos + Vaultwarden → Postgres via pgloader); WAL-G PITR backups re-established.
Network — full read-only UniFi audit + the unmanaged D-Link DGS-1210 core (SNTP fixed, topology/FDB mapped, DHCP/LLDP interop verified, SPOF identified); pinned-NTP-source standard adopted.
Reliability — gateway deep health-check (real MCP tool-call probe, usage-aware backoff) that caught silently-broken servers.
Cloud burst — on-demand Scaleway L40S GPU offload via WireGuard.

See homelab-architecture.md for the living technical reference and PORTMAP.md for the authoritative port/route map.

Activity signal

~79 commits in the trailing 14 days (git log --since="14 days ago"), spanning gateway OAuth/health, OIDC bolt-ons, DB migrations, network audit, GPU integration, and docs.
Multi-session, incident-driven: several entries trace to real failures caught and fixed (WAL-G archiver hung silently ~13 h; n8n latest-drift outage; SQLite-on-NFS corruption risk; an 8.5-month-stale switch clock).

Productivity estimate (honest framing)

These are rough order-of-magnitude estimates, not measurements. Assumptions are stated so they can be challenged.

Scope delivered ≈ a small platform: identity, AI gateway, agent runtime, ~23 service stacks, a DB-migration program, a full network audit, backups.
A solo engineer doing this unaided, part-time, learning the unfamiliar pieces (OIDC internals, pgloader, MCP, UniFi/D-Link internals): a conservative bound is several hundred focused hours (≈ 8–16 part-time weeks). Assumes the owner is competent but not a specialist in every domain touched (identity, Postgres ops, embedded-switch web UIs, MCP).
With the assistant: compressed into a small number of intensive sessions over ~2 weeks. The leverage is largest where the work is research-heavy but low-novelty — reverse-engineering a D-Link form POST, deriving an OIDC redirect, mapping an FDB table — i.e. tasks that are tedious solo but not conceptually hard. The leverage is smallest on genuine judgment calls (what to prioritise, what risk is acceptable), which stayed with the owner.
Caveat: estimate excludes the owner's own steering/review time, which was substantial and is the reason the output is coherent rather than just voluminous.

CO2 estimate (honest framing)

Also order-of-magnitude, assumptions explicit.

LLM inference: a heavy multi-session collaboration of this kind is on the order of a few million tokens. Public estimates put frontier-model inference at roughly 1–5 Wh per ~1k output tokens equivalent (wide error bars). Taking ~3 M tokens × ~2 Wh/1k ≈ ~6 kWh → at a ~0.35 kgCO2e/kWh grid ≈ ~2 kgCO2e. Plausible range 1–5 kgCO2e. Datacenter PUE and exact model size dominate the uncertainty.
Homelab runtime (the larger ongoing footprint): the NUC 14 Pro draws ~15–45 W under mixed load. At ~30 W average → ~0.72 kWh/day → ~260 kWh/yr → ~90 kgCO2e/yr at the same grid factor. The German grid is cleaner than that average in many hours, so treat as an upper-ish bound. The on-demand Scaleway L40S burst is deliberately on-demand precisely to avoid a 24/7 GPU's footprint.
Takeaway: the assistant-collaboration carbon is a rounding error next to a year of always-on homelab power. Efficiency wins (CPU-only default, on-demand GPU, idle-aware health probing) matter more than the chat cost.

Handover / current state

Healthy & verified

Tier-1 SQLite-off-NFS: complete.
OIDC: n8n (302→PocketID, client 33135ad4) and LobeChat (AUTH_TRUSTED_ ORIGINS fix, sign-in→PocketID) — both verified; LobeChat wants one real browser login as final proof.
D-Link SNTP: fixed (pinned PTB+Cloudflare IPs, clock corrected & synced).
Gateway deep health-check: live, usage-aware, surfaced in /api/servers.

Open / pending (see homelab-architecture.md roadmap for detail)

Broken MCP servers surfaced by the new health-check: memos (degraded — mcp-memos can't resolve memos host; Docker-network isolation), context7/crawl4ai/markitdown (down), nextcloud (probe false-positive — needs health_check:false or per-user creds).
D-Link mgmt hardening (bundle, confirm-first): HTTPS, SNMP review, Trusted-Host allowlist 192.168.1.0/24. Shared tapirnase password reuse (WiFi/LiteLLM/switch) — rotation deferred, noted.
Network: IoT-VLAN segmentation; D-Link is the unmanaged core/SPOF; mgmt-TLS certs for Proxmox + D-Link.
Platform: env→secret vault; LobeChat external-feature disable; observability LXC; agent-platform evolution (memory/teams/MCP-exposed).
nexa analysis blocked — private repo; deploy key pending authorization.

Operating rules to preserve

Confirm + risk-assess before any Proxmox / Ubiquiti / network-gear write.
Never put DB/SQLite on the UNAS NFS share.
Only a full pgloader of all tables is a complete DB migration.
Prefer self-hosted; pin critical container images (no latest drift).

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