Alexey Grigorev alexeygrigorev

Xray VPN for China on AWS Lightsail

A small personal VPN that works from mainland China: VLESS + XTLS-Vision + REALITY (TCP 443) via Xray, plus Hysteria2 (UDP 443) via sing-box, on a $5/month AWS Lightsail instance. Tested October 2026 with Xray 26.3.27, sing-box 1.14.3, Ubuntu 24.04 and v2RayTun on Android.

Placeholders used below: <REGION>, <SERVER_IP>, <UUID>, <PRIVATE_KEY>, <PUBLIC_KEY>, <SHORT_ID>, <HY2_PASSWORD>, <OBFS_PASSWORD>, <CERT_PIN>.

1. Choose the region

Lessons learned:

Turning a Moto G06 into a phone driven from a PC over adb

These notes cover how I set up a Motorola Moto G06 (Android 15) to be controlled from a Windows PC over USB with adb. Everything was done with Claude Code across a few sessions. The goal was a clean phone with no lock screen and no home screen: you turn it on and see the list of apps.

The phone has a Google Workspace work account on it, and the Workspace policy required a screen lock.

Everything below is done over adb with USB debugging turned on. No root needed.

US exit for Codex on Windows: SSH tunnel + local proxy on a free GCP VM

Goal: Codex (the desktop app and the CLI) talks to OpenAI from a US IP, everything else on the PC stays on the normal connection, and Codex never runs without the tunnel. No VPN client, no kernel driver.

Code (Terraform + a small Python CLI managed with uv): https://github.com/alexeygrigorev/codex-vpn

Codex app / codex CLI / browser
        │  (PAC file + HTTPS_PROXY)
        ▼

Windows PC Remote Setup

Setup notes for turning a Windows PC into a remotely accessible machine: SSH server, key-based login, a bash shell, Remote Desktop, and keeping the machine always on. Server-side steps run on the Windows machine, client-side steps on the laptop.

Server-side setup (on the Windows machine)

Android Development Best Practices

This guide captures the release, update, signing, CI, emulator, and Docker-test lessons from these local Android projects:

phone-aws-auth
ssh-auto-forward-android
pocketshell

The goal is repeatability: a future Android project should not rediscover the

Project Ideas: Prompts for Getting Unstuck

Two prompts for using ChatGPT, Claude, or any LLM to help you find and validate a project idea for an AI engineering course - or any technical course where you have to ship a capstone project.

Most students don't get stuck on the building. They get stuck on choosing what to build. They keep postponing the decision, finish the course just watching videos, and never ship anything. These prompts exist to break that loop. The goal is not to find the perfect idea - it's to pick something real you can finish.

What's in This Gist

project-interview-prompt.md - use this if you don't have an idea yet. The prompt turns the LLM into an interviewer that walks you through your hobbies, work, and daily friction to find a real problem worth solving.
project-fit-check-prompt.md - use this once you have an idea. The prompt asks the LLM to honestly review whether your idea fits a project rubric and where it's weak. It explicitly tells the model not to be encouraging by

Rust on Windows - Setup Guide

Instructions for setting up Rust on Windows, depending on your architecture.

Architectures

AMD64 (x86_64) — standard Intel/AMD processors
ARM64 (AArch64) — Snapdragon/Qualcomm ARM-based Windows devices

Remote Server Setup

Setup notes for provisioning and operating remote servers. Most of the setup is shared; provider-specific differences belong in the numbered provider files.

Provider-specific setup

Hetzner
AWS

Shared setup

	#!/usr/bin/env bash
	set -euo pipefail

	socket=tmux-demo
	session=ai-shipping-labs

	# Keep the demo isolated from your normal tmux server.
	tmux -L "$socket" kill-server 2>/dev/null \|\| true
	trap 'tmux -L "$socket" kill-server 2>/dev/null \|\| true' EXIT

	import json

	from pydantic import BaseModel
	from typing import Literal
	from pydantic_ai import Agent


	class JudgeEvaluation(BaseModel):
	reasoning: str
	label: Literal["good", "bad"]