I Handed the Agent My Server Infrastructure
I gave an agent access to my Hetzner account through the browser, to the server over SSH, and to GitHub. It walked through the whole infrastructure, broke nothing, and wrote a report with a cleanup plan — minus €700 a year in expenses.
By Georg Malahov
Today I got to what is probably the last big task on Call Copilot — my browser extension for call transcription: optimizing the costs. Claude and I thought it all through and decided: move the project to the free tier of Supabase — the cloud database it lives on — and cover the domain that gets lost in the process with the simplest possible proxy through my own server.
And while I was at it, I took the step I had been heading toward since June, when I first wrote down the thought of giving agents devops access. My experiments are getting more and more dangerous. Today I gave the agent access to my Hetzner account — the German hosting provider where my server lives — through the browser: walk around, compare costs, see what I'm paying for, what backups exist and when I made them, what the configuration is. The same over SSH: rummage through the server itself, find all the configurations, figure out what lives where. Plus GitHub. Essentially, I handed it almost my entire server infrastructure.
It handled it exactly as I asked: it obeyed, just walked around and explored, touched nothing. And it wrote a report on my project board in Miro: which services I have running, what's responsible for what, how the backups stand, what the update plan is. We planned it all out — now it just needs doing.
Concrete savings came out of the report, too. The server itself isn't something you can optimize much, but mine was on an old plan: migrating gives more CPU and comes out €6–7 cheaper per month. Leaving the paid Supabase tier — about €32 more. Plus the project board in Miro, which I had been keeping on an expensive plan for communicating with a client on an already finished project: moving to a simpler plan — another €18 a month off. In total — close to €700 a year in expenses, cut simply by putting the infrastructure and the services I pay for in order.
Now, about the risk. On one hand, it's small: these are my own small, half-test projects, not other people's data. On the other — I'm handing the agent more and more, and I have to be clear-eyed about it: its capabilities keep growing. Last time I gave an agent a browser in a place where my money was sitting, it ended in a €200 lesson. So I'm doing this gradually, step by step, and this time the access was look-and-tell, not do. When all this will come back to bite me — no idea. I hope never — and the insurance against this kind of access is one simple thing: everything is backed up, and even in a disaster I can redeploy the infrastructure from scratch in an hour at most.
What's left is to walk through the report's plan by hand: migrate the plan, cancel the extras, get the backups in order — so that if the apocalypse hits, I can bring the whole server back up in a couple of hours. The day the agent does that part itself too, with me only confirming — that's when the word "handed" in the title stops being an exaggeration.