ALPHA - A masochistic exploration into Vibe Coding the wrong way.

Motivation:
I lost my eyesight nine years ago and am finally at a point where I can regularly use a computer with almost the same ease as before the accident. I was a full-stack developer. My go-to tools were C#, Visual Studio, SQL Server, and much more.

A lot has changed, and I have a lot of catching up to do. Installing Visual Studio, SQL Server, and other heavy tooling on the only machine I rely on seemed like a good way to end up blocked from dealing with life's obligations while troubleshooting development issues. It also increases the machine's attack surface.

I decided to use Hyper-V and put Visual Studio and other tooling in VMs. That also gave me an opportunity to try vibe coding with Copilot and Claude.

Vibe coding is proving to be an exercise in herding cats. The code starts as spaghetti, gets refactored into gumbo, and eventually I realize some of the spaghetti never got served.

Massokissed.LazyVM

Currently this is a tool for setting up educational Visual Studio dev environment VMs on Windows using Hyper-V.

If I can master herding cats this will be a tool for deploying, maintain and destroying Hyper-V virtual machine in Windows. This tool will have templates geared for different workloads that community can maintain that will not only be educational dev environments coupled to Windows Enterprise evaluation.

One-person entities, like a bookkeeper, will benefit having free tooling for easily(chuckle) setup and maintain VMs created for each customer. Making isolating, protecting, lightening the load for when disaster recovery is needed and greatly aid in satisfying ethical and legal requiredments eg. a health provider's business associate.

P.S. This might be migrated to C# since I lack the knowledge of the best practices and the proven patterns for authoring maintainable PowerShell tools. This was going to be a vehicle for pushing me to gain that knowledge, but I am feeling irresponsible for sharing a learning project as tool to the communit.

Why is the information badly fragmented now? I can't find a coherent horse's mouth.

What it needs

` A cert for signing code

What is is

-A PowerShell module that builds and looks after Hyper-V development VMs on a Windows host, unattended: Windows 11 Enterprise Evaluation, Visual Studio, SQL Server Enterprise Developer and whatever other tools you install, with the 90-day evaluation handled for you. The reset flag has a lifespan of being flipped three times. 4 * 90 = 360

What it does

• Builds a VM with no input from you. It creates the VM, installs Windows from an answer file, then installs everything in the VM's tooling list: Visual Studio and SSMS with their workloads and Marketplace extensions, SQL Server, and winget packages.
• Keeps the VM's tooling list current. Every day it records what you have added or removed in the VM, taking a Hyper-V checkpoint first, so any recorded version can be returned to.
• Makes the 90-day evaluation a non-event. It watches the licence and rearms Windows while it can. When it can't, it captures your state, rebuilds the VM and puts everything back: databases, logins, Visual Studio settings, certificates, environment and application settings.
• Keeps your source safe across rebuilds. Source lives on a Dev Drive whose disk a rebuild never touches.
• Runs several VMs on one host, each with its own tools, disks, schedule and restore points.
• Never stops over a typo. If a settings file breaks, the scheduled maintenance uses the last version that worked and says so in the log.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11 Pro, Enterprise or Education on the host (Hyper-V is not available on Home).
• PowerShell 7.4 or later, run as administrator: winget install Microsoft.PowerShell.
• A Windows 11 Enterprise Evaluation ISO, downloaded by hand from the Microsoft Evaluation Center. LazyVM opens that page for you if it can't find one.
• Memory and disk for each VM. By default a VM starts with 8 GB of memory and can grow to 16 GB. Its disks are 120 GB for Windows, 100 GB for SQL data and 250 GB for the Dev Drive, all dynamically expanding.

Install

Open PowerShell 7 (pwsh, not Windows PowerShell) as administrator.

From a release (no Git needed): download Massokissed.LazyVM-<version>.zip from the latest release, then, in the folder you saved it to:

Unblock-File .\Massokissed.LazyVM-*.zip
Expand-Archive .\Massokissed.LazyVM-*.zip -DestinationPath .\LazyVM -Force
.\LazyVM\Install.ps1

From the repository:

git clone https://github.com/downerboy/Massokissed.LazyVM S:\Source\Massokissed.LazyVM
cd S:\Source\Massokissed.LazyVM
./build.ps1 -Bootstrap -Task Install

This builds the module, checks it with PSScriptAnalyzer, runs the Pester tests and, only if they all pass, installs it for all users, which the scheduled maintenance needs because it runs as SYSTEM. -Bootstrap installs Pester and PSScriptAnalyzer the first time. Open a new PowerShell 7 window afterwards.

Quick start

Build-LazyVM -Name DevBox

That is all. The first time, it:

• chooses a folder for LazyVM (LazyVM on the local drive with the most free space) and says where; run Set-LazyVMRoot first to choose your own;
• creates the VM's profile;
• finds the Windows ISO. Leave it in your Downloads folder and LazyVM moves it into place. If there is none it opens the download page and stops; run the command again once it has downloaded;
• turns Hyper-V on if needed, restarting the host and carrying on by itself;
• downloads SQL Server, installs Windows, then everything in the tooling list;
• schedules the daily maintenance.

It takes an hour or two and needs no input. Running it again finishes an interrupted build.

To sign in to the VM yourself, Get-LazyVMCredential -Name DevBox -AsPlainText shows the account and the password LazyVM generated.

Commands

Every command has full help: Get-Help Build-LazyVM -Full. -Name can be left out while the host has only one VM, and it tab-completes.

Command	What it does
Set-LazyVMRoot	Chooses your own folder for LazyVM instead of the automatic one. Brings a 1.x kit across.
New-LazyVM	Creates a VM's profile without building it. -From starts from another VM's settings and tools.
Build-LazyVM	Builds the VM, setting up whatever is missing first, and schedules its maintenance. Safe to run again.
Get-LazyVM	Lists the VMs, their state and their maintenance.
Get-LazyVMSetting	Every setting as a VM uses it, where the value came from, and what it does.
Set-LazyVMCredential / Get-LazyVMCredential	The administrator account LazyVM uses inside the VM.
Get-LazyVMLicense	Evaluation days and rearms left, and what maintenance will do.
Get-LazyVMTooling	What is installed in the VM, and what the next maintenance run would record.
Save-LazyVMTooling	Records tooling changes now, with a checkpoint.
Get-LazyVMRestorePoint / Restore-LazyVMTooling	Lists recorded tooling versions, and returns to one.
Save-LazyVMState / Restore-LazyVMState	Captures the VM's state to the host, and puts it back.
Invoke-LazyVMRebuild	Rebuilds the VM from scratch, keeping your work.
Invoke-LazyVMMaintenance / Register-LazyVMMaintenance	The daily maintenance run, and scheduling it.
Remove-LazyVM	Deletes a VM and everything created for it. -WhatIf lists it all first.

Commands that change something support -WhatIf and -Confirm.

Settings

Your settings are JSON files in the LazyVM folder. An update never touches them:

• Config\LazyVM.Settings.json applies to every VM.
• Config\VMs\<Name>\VM.json applies to one VM, and overrides the host-wide file.

List only what you want to change:

{
  "$schema": "./LazyVM.Settings.schema.json",
  "MemMaxGB": 24,
  "DevDriveSizeGB": 300
}

Open them in VS Code. The schema beside them gives autocomplete, shows each setting's description and default when you hover over it, and underlines mistakes as you type. Get-LazyVMSetting lists every setting with its current value.

Documentation

The guide covers every command, setting and phase, and what to do when something goes wrong.

The use case diagrams show who does what with LazyVM, in UML. The flow diagrams show, for each thing you do with LazyVM, which functions run in what order and what each one reads and writes.

Development

src/Massokissed.LazyVM/
  Massokissed.LazyVM.psd1, .psm1   the module
  Public/                          one file per command
  Private/<Area>/                  everything else, by area
  Data/                            the settings schema and the default tooling list
tests/                             Pester tests
build.ps1                          build, analyze and test

./build.ps1 merges the module into out\, runs PSScriptAnalyzer (any finding fails the build) and runs the Pester tests. GitHub Actions runs the same on Windows for every push.

Licence

LazyVM is free for personal and other noncommercial use under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. Using it for a commercial purpose needs a separate commercial licence; contact the author through GitHub.