How I Manage My VPS With Pi’s SSH Extension

Let me be honest about my Linux level first, because this whole article depends on it.

I live in my IDE. These days, an agentic desktop. I write prompts, I review diffs, I ship PRs. I almost never SSH into a server, and when I do, my knowledge stops at apt update, docker compose up, and restarting nginx when it sulks. Anything past that (ufw rules, PostgreSQL allow-lists, Caddy configs) lived in a notes file. Every server task meant opening that file and copy-pasting commands one by one.

Last month, I set up a brand-new VPS from scratch using Pi. It runs system updates, Docker, firewall, app deployment, and HTTPS with my domain in six lines of code.

Here’s the setup, the exact commands it ran, and the one lesson I learned the hard way: an agentic harness is only as safe as the model you plug into it. Your model choice decides whether this saves you an hour or locks you out of your own server.

What is Pi?