Adding AI to a home lab
Where an AI assistant fits alongside Proxmox, TrueNAS and Home Assistant — and what each layer should own.
If you already run a home lab, you do not need another operating system. You need the assistant layer, running somewhere sensible, without becoming a fourth thing to maintain by hand.
What each layer should own
A workable division:
- Proxmox — virtualisation, snapshots, HA if you have it.
- TrueNAS (or ZFS elsewhere) — bulk data, shares, the copy that must not be lost.
- Home Assistant — physical devices and automations.
- deputyOS — the assistant: channels, memory, documents, scheduled work.
The failure mode is collapsing these. An agent that can run shell commands should not live on the box holding your only copy of everything.
Running it as a guest
proxmox is a supported target — see deputyOS on Proxmox. It
behaves like any other guest, so Proxmox snapshots and backups apply normally,
while deputyOS handles its own A/B updates with rollback.
Give it 8 GB and four cores to start, with --cpu host so it sees virtualisation
features.
Reaching your data
Mount the shares you want it to see, rather than copying data onto the guest. SMB and NFS both work, every mount is reviewable and revocable from the console, and the boundary stays clear. See mount drives.
Mount narrowly. An assistant with an agent loop and read-write access to everything is a larger blast radius than most people intend.
Talking to Home Assistant
deputyOS profiles can call local HTTP APIs, so reaching a Home Assistant instance on the same LAN is routine. Keep the split sensible: automations stay in Home Assistant, questions go to the assistant. See deputyOS vs Home Assistant.
Remote access without another exposed service
Home labs accumulate exposed services. The reverse tunnel avoids adding one — the device holds an outbound connection and is reachable at a per-device URL with nothing forwarded.
If you already run WireGuard or Tailscale, use that instead; deputyOS does not require its own path.
When you have several
The fleet view is the reason to link devices to an account: one console with live status, per-device spend, and allow-listed commands across a selection. Proxmox tells you a guest is running; it does not tell you the assistant inside is healthy or what it spent yesterday.
homelabproxmoxuse-case