An experimental guide to transitioning from a tethered SSH/terminal workflow to a resilient, mobile-friendly environment for running AI agents autonomously—without relying on managed platforms or incurring high idle costs.
This design lets you run long-lived agent loops in the cloud and drive them primarily from a web browser on your laptop or phone (via a Zero-Trust tunnel), receive async push notifications when the agents need a human, and keep the whole stack alive across devices — with plain SSH reserved only for bootstrapping and administration.
- Compute: Hetzner Cloud cost-optimized ARM VM — the flavor I use is CAX33 (see cost-optimized). Flavors change over time; if you don't see CAX33, pick the current cost-optimized ARM flavor in your size/price range.
- Orchestration:
zellijto keep the long-running daemons (the OpenCode server and the ngrok tunnel)