I built my own Kubernetes management app with AI as a first-class citizen.

When I first started running my own Kubernetes cluster, I was leaning heavily on using Claude via Claude Code to troubleshoot app issues and to troubleshoot Kubernetes issues as well.

I am not skilled at DevOps, and if it weren't for AI, to be honest, I don't think I would be able to run my own Kubernetes cluster in the time it took me to get set up and running.

I enjoyed the UI of Rancher, but not its overhead, and I enjoyed the speed and simplicity of K9S, but I wanted a UI that was unified. The best of Rancher, the best of K9S.

For the last two to three months, I have been building an app called Rigel that has a beautiful UI experience with AI as a first‑class citizen. It allows you to connect to Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, or any other models provided by OpenCode using their harnesses. I will be implementing local support here soon as well.

In the coming months, I will talk about how I plan to market this thing. We're getting close to feeling confident about sharing it with people, but to be honest, I'm maybe a month late. Although I am my own first customer, everything is fine in reality. In the next month or two, I will be trying to find actual users for the app.

I genuinely believe that this app will allow small teams, big teams, and solo developers who want their own easy-to-maintain Kubernetes cluster. It will make it very easy for them to do this without the headache and hassle, without having to be a DevOps expert. They will be able to run their own Kubernetes cluster on their own hardware, self-host their apps through a one-click feature, and rest confidently that the system is running smoothly.

This is just an introductory post, as I plan on sharing my experience in short notes on how I'm going to go about sharing this app and getting users.