Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at kagent-claude.

kagent-claude is a setup that gets kagent version 0.8.6 running on Windows 11 using Minikube, with Claude Sonnet as the AI model powering it. The session was saved back in April 2026 and at that point it was running fine, just waiting on an API credit top-up.

Let’s start with the environment. You’ve got six tools in play here. Minikube at version 1.38.1, kubectl at version 1.34.1, Helm at version 4.1.4, Docker Desktop at version 29.4.0, kagent itself at version 0.8.6, and the Claude model being used is claude-sonnet-4-6. Minikube is using Docker as its driver, running through WSL2. Memory is capped at around 3,800 megabytes, which is the Docker Desktop limit. Everything lives in a Kubernetes namespace called kagent.

Now let’s walk through the three Kubernetes resources that were created to make this work.

The first is a secret. This is how you securely pass your Anthropic API key into the cluster. The command creates a generic secret called kagent-secrets inside the kagent namespace and stores your API key under a label called ANTHROPIC_API_KEY. Think of it as a locked box that Kubernetes can open whenever it needs to authenticate with Anthropic.

The second resource is a ModelConfig, called claude-sonnet. This is essentially a configuration file that tells kagent which AI model to use and how to use it. It points to Anthropic as the provider, specifies claude-sonnet-4-6 as the model, and references that secret you just created so it can grab the API key. There is also a field for the secret key name pointing to ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, and this is important — we will come back to why in a moment. The model is configured with a maximum of 8,096 tokens and a temperature of 0.7, which gives you a balance between creative and focused responses.

The third resource is the agent itself, called claude-test-agent. This is a declarative agent using the Python runtime, pointed at your claude-sonnet model config. Its system message tells it to act as a helpful Kubernetes assistant powered by Claude Sonnet. It is also wired up to four Kubernetes tools via an MCP server: one for getting resources, one for describing a resource, one for fetching pod logs, and one for retrieving cluster events. So this agent can actually look around your Kubernetes cluster and answer questions about what is happening inside it.

Once everything is deployed, you access the UI through a port-forward command. This routes the kagent UI service from inside your cluster out to port 8080 on your local machine, so you can open a browser and go to localhost colon 8080 to start chatting with your agent.

If you ever need to resume the setup after a restart, the process has four steps. Start Docker Desktop, then run minikube start with the Docker driver, then run the port-forward command again, and finally open localhost colon 8080 in your browser.

Now, there are three known issues worth knowing about.

The first is an authentication error that says something like could not resolve authentication method. This happened because the ModelConfig was originally written with the wrong field name — the incorrect version ends in Ref, but the correct field name does not. The fix is to recreate the ModelConfig with the right field name, then bounce the agent by scaling its deployment down to zero replicas and back up to one.

The second issue is pods getting stuck in a pending state due to not enough memory. With only around 3,800 megabytes available, too many bundled agents were competing for resources. The fix was deleting the agents that were not needed — specifically the Cilium debug, manager, and policy agents, the kgateway agent, and the argo-rollouts conversion agent. Removing those freed up enough memory for everything important to run.

The third issue is a 400 error related to API credits. This is a billing distinction that is easy to miss: your Claude Pro subscription on claude.ai and your Anthropic API account at console.anthropic.com are completely separate billing systems. If you are using kagent with an API key, you need credits in the API console specifically. The fix is to top up at console.anthropic.com under settings and then billing.

So to recap: kagent-claude gives you a Claude-powered Kubernetes assistant running locally in Minikube. You set it up with a secret for your API key, a ModelConfig pointing at Claude Sonnet, and a declarative agent with four Kubernetes tools attached. The UI is a simple port-forward away. Watch out for the field name on the ModelConfig, keep memory free by pruning unused agents, and make sure your API credits are topped up separately from your Claude subscription.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.