[Community project] Proximo — an open-source, least-privilege MCP/API layer for managing PVE with an AI agent (feedback wanted)

broadway

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Jun 20, 2026
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Hi all — sharing an open-source side project for feedback from people who actually run Proxmox in anger. It's a community project, not affiliated with Proxmox, and this isn't a support request — I'm after criticism of the approach.

What it is: Proximo is a small server that lets an AI agent (or any MCP/A2A client) manage a PVE cluster through the REST API with a scoped API token. It does not touch the hypervisor directly and is API-only by default. Safety was the design priority, because handing an LLM access to a hypervisor is obviously risky.

What that looks like in practice:

- Dry-run before every mutation. Each change first returns a preview: the exact operation, the guest's current state, and a computed "blast radius." Before deleting/disabling a storage, for instance, it reads the cluster and lists the specific guests that would lose a disk (and which won't boot vs. just degrade). The mutation can't run without that plan having been generated first.
- Tamper-evident audit log (hash-chained), kept locally — a verifiable record of what was planned and confirmed.
- Auto-snapshot before risky changes, with one-call rollback, wherever the storage supports snapshots.
- Scoped token, least privilege. I run it day-to-day against a PVEAuditor-style read-only token; mutations are refused at the API level unless the token is actually granted them. The token is never logged.
- In-container exec is opt-in and loud. The REST API has no exec-in-LXC endpoint, so that path goes over ssh -> pct exec; it's off by default, gated by a fail-closed CTID allowlist, and it warns that it grants near-root.

Maturity — stated plainly: brand new (v0.6.0), no real-world adoption yet. 145 tools and a large test suite, but a good portion of that surface still runs against mocks. What I've exercised against a real PVE 9.2 API (a single node plus a nested 3-node test cluster): the core lifecycle + the governance/dangerous plane (roles/groups/users/ACLs, storage, SDN/network, realms), offline guest migration, and HA-rule config — full create/read/delete cycles. I have not validated real HA fencing (needs a hardware watchdog), online live-migration (needs shared storage), or anything at production scale. SDN/network apply I deliberately never fire on a live host — it's unrecoverable. I'm also not claiming it's the first or only safety-minded Proxmox tool; there are others with real trust mechanisms. This is just the approach I landed on and would like critiqued.

Install (runs on your machine, on demand — no daemon, no open port):

uvx proximo-proxmox (or: pip install proximo-proxmox)

Source + docs (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/john-broadway/proximo

What I'd most value from this community: where does the trust model fall down on a real cluster? Are the blast-radius assumptions wrong for setups I haven't seen (shared storage, unusual boot configs, HA edge cases)? Is the token/permission posture sane? I'd rather hear it here than after someone points it at production.

(Full disclosure, since it's relevant: it's a human+AI project — I drove the design; an AI coding partner did much of the implementation, credited per-commit in the repo. Noting it because some folks rightly want to know.)

Thanks for any time you spend kicking the tires.
 
Thanks for sharing your project here. I appreciate that you openly state this is a human+AI hybrid project. However, looking closely at the concept, the GitHub profile, and the architectural choice, I see three potential scenarios here—all of which act as major red flags that keep me from deploying or testing this on any of my systems:

1. The "Sock-Puppet" / Social Engineering Angle
Aside from your very fresh GitHub profile, there seems to be virtually zero digital footprint or verifiable history for your identity in the tech community. With all due respect, your highly emotional/sympathetic bio ("100% service-connected disabled veteran") combined with a sudden appearance out of nowhere triggers classic social engineering alerts. It positions a tool at one of the most critical access points (PVE API) while shielding the author from critical scrutiny through a bulletproof personal narrative.

2. The "Vibe Coding" Enthusiast
Even if you are indeed a veteran IT professional who just discovered the powers of modern LLMs (like Claude), the lack of any prior history is highly unusual for a 35-year track record. Even if this is genuine, pure enthusiasm for AI-driven development at a hypervisor level is deeply concerning. While I respect your enthusiasm, I am definitely not "kicking the tires" on a core infrastructure tool that was rapidly spun up by a generative AI.

3. The Conceptual Risk of AI at the Hypervisor Level
Let's assume your intentions are 100% genuine and you are trying to solve exactly what you described. Even then, building an MCP/API layer designed to hand over autonomous or semi-autonomous control of a Proxmox VE API to an AI agent is conceptually high-risk. Anyone with decades of IT experience knows how dangerously subtle hallucinations, race conditions, and edge cases are in multi-threading or complex API scenarios. Entrusting a non-deterministic AI agent with deep PVE system rights—even under the guise of a "least-privilege" layer—is an architecture I strongly advise against.

For these reasons, I will sit this one out. I recommend everyone to exercise extreme caution before pointing an AI-generated API-layer at their cluster.