This is the real stack behind an AI-maintained second brain — one small machine and a short list of services. It’s a deliberately short page, because the setup genuinely is this small. Most of what makes it work is discipline, not hardware.
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The whole system runs on one small machine. This is genuinely all the hardware it takes.
Ryzen 7 8745H, 32GB DDR5, 1TB SSD, WiFi 6E, BT 5.3
The actual machine in the photo -- it runs Linux Mint, Claude Code and Obsidian around the clock, headless. $699 new. Under 32GB of RAM, running the agent alongside everything else gets tight.
View on Amazon (affiliate link)Battery backup, roughly 60-120 minutes at this machine's headless load
Added the same night a real power outage killed every running session. Not an affiliate link -- I already owned this one and haven't verified a product link worth pointing you at.
Visit site (not an affiliate link)None of these are affiliate links. There's no affiliate programme behind them, and listing them anyway is the honest version of "what does this actually cost to run."
$125/month
The AI that actually maintains the vault. By far the largest line item, and the one real single point of failure in the whole setup.
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The vault itself is just a folder of markdown files. Obsidian is how I read and edit them; nothing is locked inside it.
Visit site (not an affiliate link)Free, open source
Keeps the vault in sync between the mini PC, my phone and my laptop. Also the thing that caused the single worst near-miss of the first month.
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How I reach the machine from anywhere without exposing anything to the open internet.
Visit site (not an affiliate link)Under $0.05/month at this size
Encrypted offsite backup, the third of three independent backup layers.
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