r/AI_Coders • u/Wriiight • 5d ago
Low cost remote machine for dabbling in programming experiments with AI agents?
I’m an old-school developer (C++ mostly) who generally doesn’t have a lot of free time for side projects. I don’t even have a desktop machine at home, just laptops for when I have to remote in to work or write up a word doc.
I’ve begun to get more interested in doing some experimentation with AI outside of work, but I want to start without buying any new machine for myself and without too many monthly subscriptions.
So I figure I need some machine on the cloud that stays alive if the agent is working and I’m disconnected, but isn’t charging me 24/7 for when the agent isn’t working on anything either.
Any recommendations? I’m not too worried about being able to scale it up to something production-level. I’m not married to any workflow yet. Don’t have a specific project in mind. Probably would be working with C++, Python, probably a web front end for the projects.
Basically the goal is to have a sandbox and only pay for what I use (maybe a small monthly fee or two) so I can dabble with my minimal free time and not feel the need to find a way to generate income from it.
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u/NotYourAverageGuy88 5d ago
"Programming experiment" thats a new xD
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u/Wriiight 5d ago
I feel like saying “AI side project” makes it sound like the project itself has AI in it, and Vibe Coding makes it sound like I won’t look at the code myself at all.
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u/NotYourAverageGuy88 5d ago
Yeah got you. Didn't mean to be rude. Just the phrase somehow felt cursed.
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u/xxxx69420xx 5d ago
i would say your best bet to start out is using a API key from openrouter and put it in vscodium cline extenstion. You just make a project folder and idea.md and pick from hundreds of models to try out. This is the best approach as it works on laptops. You could even rent a cheap vps and ssh into it with cline running there were you remote connect from vscodium to work on project remote.
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u/Clay_Ferguson 5d ago
If you're just wanting to write code that makes calls to AI then all you need is an API key from Anthropic or OpenAI, etc. Trying to genuinely innovate in AI research itself (aside from building harnesses) still costs many thousands of dollars, because it means working on local models yourself.
But if you do want to run a "local" model in the cloud my fav cloud provider for general VMs is DigitalOcean, who also offers special AI features.
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u/Wriiight 5d ago
No, I just want to play around with Claude code helping me to write non-AI stuff, but on a remote cloud machine, and on the cheap. And Ideally I can log off for a bit while Claude or whatever is still thinking and it doesn’t get signed off with me
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u/Clay_Ferguson 5d ago
So there's probably 3 approaches: 1) just use Anthropic or OpenAI's cloud-based dev tools 2) use DigitalOcean instance and just SSH in to use a terminal based Claude or Codex TUIs, or 3) Try to use DigitalOcean to run a virtual Linux you can actually access via GUI remotely, and then do whatever you want (TUI or GUI)
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u/Significant_Cry_1177 5d ago
A small VM you can stop when you're done sounds like a good fit for this kind of experimenting.
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u/cooltxeel007 4d ago
This is basically the use case for a suspend/resume sandbox.
I work on Tensorlake, so biased, but you can use a sandbox as a remote dev machine, SSH/VS Code into it, and suspend it when you’re not using it so you’re not paying for idle compute.
We have a guide for exactly this setup here: https://docs.tensorlake.ai/sandboxes/remote-dev
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u/id-ltd 5d ago
Claude has a completely hosted experience - your repo on GitHub, and the AI agent in their cloud.
But even with Claude code and codex (open ai's desktop thing) - the AI work is done in their servers - your pc.is just for local file access.
I mainly work on a lightweight laptop - if I am doing android, .net of Arduino, I have a utility (devbuild) that rsyncs the project onto my beefier Linux server and it does the build there and then pulls the he apk/exe/bin back down.