vps-forge: AI Agents Set Up Debian/Ubuntu VPS Without Risk of Losing SSH Access

⚡ The gist in 5 seconds - vps-forge has been published on GitHub — an Agent Skill that guides an AI agent through setting up and hardening a Debian/Ubuntu VPS. - It works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot and other agents; the sources are in the mountain-beaver/vps-forge repository. - Only Debian and Ubuntu are listed as supported: other distros are not mentioned. ### 🔍 What was found The mountain-beaver/vps-forge repository appeared on GitHub as an Agent Skill — a set of instructions that an agent picks up and executes directly on the server. The author lists five areas: SSH, firewall, fail2ban, updates, and Docker. The main promise in the description is that the agent won't leave you locked out of your VPS — that is, it won't break SSH access mid-setup. The description doesn't reveal the internal mechanics: it only contains a task list and the phrase "without locking you out." In essence, this is a hardening checklist that the agent goes through step by step, instead of blindly editing sshd_config and firewall rules. The specific commands, step order, and checks are in the repository itself — they aren't on the project page. ### 💡 Why it matters Agents have long since left the sandbox: Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor now reach real machines. One typo in an SSH config or firewall rules — and the server is only accessible through the hosting provider's console. vps-forge targets exactly this pain point: it embeds basic VPS hygiene into a skill that the agent executes on its own. It will come in handy for anyone spinning up a fresh server for a pet project who doesn't want to manually set up SSH, fail2ban, and updates.