vastai

vast-claude-plugin

A Claude Code plugin for Vast.ai. Rent, launch, monitor, and tear down GPU instances — plus volumes, serverless endpoints, and billing — without leaving your editor.

The plugin combines two layers:

• Five slash commands wrap the highest-frequency renter operations with safe defaults.
• Two bundled skills give Claude full command-reference knowledge of the vastai CLI, so anything the slash commands don't cover works through natural language:
  • vastai — renter operations: search and launch instances, SSH, copy, logs, exec, destroy, volumes, serverless, env vars, billing.
  • vastai-host — GPU provider operations: list/unlist machines, pricing, maintenance windows, self-tests, earnings, marketplace metrics. Auto-loads on host-intent prompts.

Slash commands

Command	What it does
/vastai:setup [api-key]	Stores your API key, registers your SSH public key with Vast, and verifies the credential against vastai show user. Run this once before anything else — launching an instance before an SSH key is registered produces an unreachable host.
/vastai:status [instance-id]	Snapshot of a single instance or all of yours. Flags terminal states (exited, unknown, offline) so polling loops actually terminate.
/vastai:cost	Account balance, current burn rate ($/hr across active instances), and projected 24-hour spend. Useful as a pre-flight check before launching anything large.
/vastai:search [filter]	Finds the cheapest rentable offers matching a filter, sorted by total $/hr. Recognises "spot" / "bid" in the filter and switches to interruptible bid-mode pricing automatically.
/vastai:launch <offer-id> [image] [--disk N] [--label STR]	Launches an offer with sensible defaults: pytorch/pytorch:@vastai-automatic-tag, 20 GB disk, direct SSH, JSON output. Parses the returned new_contract ID so subsequent commands can reference it.

Every vastai invocation includes --raw so responses come back as parseable JSON.

Natural language (the skills)

Anything outside the slash-command set works conversationally. The right skill auto-loads based on intent.

Renter prompts load vastai:

"Find a verified 4090 under $0.40/hr and launch it with pytorch."

"SSH into instance 12345 and tail /var/log/nvidia-installer.log."

"Set HF_TOKEN to hf_xxxxx on my running instance."

"Destroy everything except instance 12345."

Host prompts load vastai-host:

"List my machine 98765 at $0.30/GPU/hr."

"Schedule maintenance on machine 98765 next Tuesday at 02:00 UTC for 4 hours."

"Show my host earnings for last month."

"What's the going rate for RTX 4090s in the US right now?"

To force a skill to load explicitly, mention it by name ("using the vastai skill, …" or "using the vastai-host skill, …").

Install

Prerequisites

pip install vastai

From the Claude Plugins marketplace (recommended)

/plugin install vastai@claude-plugins-official

From source

git clone https://github.com/vast-ai/vast-claude-plugin.git
claude --plugin-dir ./vast-claude-plugin

First run

/vastai:setup

You'll be prompted for an API key from https://console.vast.ai/manage-keys/. The command then registers your SSH public key (~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub by default, falling back to id_rsa.pub) and verifies the credential by querying your user record.

Layout

vast-claude-plugin/
├── .claude-plugin/plugin.json    # marketplace manifest
├── commands/
│   ├── setup.md                  # /vastai:setup
│   ├── status.md                 # /vastai:status
│   ├── cost.md                   # /vastai:cost
│   ├── search.md                 # /vastai:search
│   └── launch.md                 # /vastai:launch
├── skills/
│   ├── vastai/SKILL.md           # renter skill
│   └── vastai-host/SKILL.md      # GPU provider / host skill
└── TESTING.md                    # acceptance test plan

License

MIT — see LICENSE.