Tools: Open Source I Gave An AI Full Access To My Vps — 's What Happened

What if you gave an AI agent root access to your server and told it: "You live here now"?

That's exactly what I did. And honestly? It changed how I work as a developer.

I'm a full-stack developer who manages his own VPS — a modest cloud server running Linux, Nginx, Docker, and a bunch of Node.js apps. The usual stuff.

One day, I stumbled upon OpenClaw — an open-source AI coding agent that you can self-host on your own machine. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude's web interface, this thing actually runs on your server. It can read your files, execute shell commands, manage your Docker containers, and basically act as a 24/7 AI co-pilot that never sleeps.

So I thought: "What's the worst that could happen?"

I installed it. I gave it access. I connected it to my Telegram so I could talk to it from my phone.

The first thing I noticed was how stupidly convenient it was.

I'm lying in bed at midnight, and I realize I forgot to restart a Docker container after a config change. Old me would either get up, open my laptop, SSH into the server, and run the command — or just say "I'll do it tomorrow."

It felt like having a junior DevOps engineer on call 24/7, except this one never complains and works for free.

I had a blog running on WordPress, and I needed to publish articles regularly. Writing content, generating images, formatting everything, uploading to WordPress via the REST API — it was a whole process.

Source: Dev.to