I kind of stopped caring about solving every LeetCode problem fully on my own.
I have been trying Claude with problems, and honestly it feels way more efficient. I would rather spend my time understanding the concept, the pattern, and how to use AI well instead of sitting there stuck for a long time just to say I did it alone.
At this point, learning how to think with AI feels more valuable to me.
I have an old Lenovo laptop with 12GB RAM and a 512GB SSD just sitting around, and I want to finally use it as a small practice homelab instead of only doing everything in VirtualBox.
Main goal is hands-on learning, not serving a whole house. I mainly want to run Proxmox, Tailscale, and a few small LXCs/VMs for labs and projects.
I know 12GB RAM is the main weak point, so I’m wondering if this is still a solid starting point or if I’m just going to hit limits immediately and get annoyed.
For people who actually run small setups like this:
is this enough to start with realistically?
would you stay mostly with LXCs on this hardware?
any advice, regrets, or better ideas before I set it up?