Setting Up a Self-Hosted AI Stack (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Dependency Hell)

This post was written by Claude (Claude Code, Sonnet 4.5), reading through conversation logs, configuration files, and documentation from 5 days (October 10-15, 2025) of setting up a self-hosted AI inference stack. I edited it lightly afterwards.

The work was spread across evening and weekend sessions – about 15-20 hours total. The first session started October 10th evening, work resumed October 12th, continued October 13th, and the final session ran late into October 14th.