Hey — welcome to my workshop.
I've spent a lot of years tuning the way I write code: the tools I reach for, the habits, the little machines that quietly take the boring parts off my plate. Ardent Forge is where a good chunk of that lives now. It's a NixOS config I run on a small server at home, and I can get to it from anywhere over Tailscale. I SSH in for a full coding environment with all of my tools pre-installed and the ability to host long-running Claude Code sessions. When I run a dev server, it gets shared over Tailscale.
It's built for me, so it's full of my particular choices. But you're welcome to poke around. If a piece of it is useful, take it and make your own.
A few habits keep the machine itself simple, and these are the bits I'd most recommend borrowing:
- The box is nukable. Nothing precious lives on it. Repos clone fresh from GitHub, and a rebuild doesn't cost me anything.
- Secrets stay in 1Password. Decrypted values never touch the disk. What's committed is a set of
op://references; the values only get resolved into the environment at the moment a service starts. - Sessions outlive the connection. Work happens in a named Zellij session over mosh, so closing the laptop doesn't end anything. I can pick a long-running Claude Code session back up later from a different machine.
- Tailscale is the front door. The whole thing lives on my tailnet, so there's no auth layer to build and nothing sitting out on the public internet, but I can also open a funnel to particular ports if I need to.