Getting DeepSeek-OCR working on an Nvidia Spark via brute force with Claude Code

Summary

Getting DeepSeek-OCR working on an NVIDIA Spark via brute force using Claude Code 20th October 2025 DeepSeek released a new model yesterday: DeepSeek-OCR, a 6.6GB model fine-tuned specifically for OCR. They released it as model weights that run using PyTorch and CUDA. I got it running on the NVIDIA Spark by having Claude Code effectively brute force the challenge of getting it working on that particular hardware. This small project (40 minutes this morning, most of which was Claude Code churning away while I had breakfast and did some other things) ties together a bunch of different concepts I’ve been exploring recently. I designed an agentic loop for the problem, gave Claude full permissions inside a Docker sandbox, embraced the parallel agents lifestyle and reused my notes on the NVIDIA Spark from last week. I knew getting a PyTorch CUDA model running on the Spark was going to be a little frustrating, so I decided to outsource the entire process to Claude Code to see what would happen. TLDR: It worked. It took four prompts (one long, three very short) to have Claude Code figure out everything necessary to run the new DeepSeek model on the NVIDIA Spark, OCR a document for me and produce copious notes about the process. The setup I connected to the Spark from my Mac via SSH and started a new Docker container there: docker run -it --gpus=all \ -v /usr/local/cuda:/usr/local/cuda:ro \ nvcr.io/nvidia/cuda:13.0.1-devel-ubuntu24.04 \ bash Then I installed npm and used that to install Claude Code: apt-get update DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive TZ=Etc/UTC apt-get install -y npm npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code Then started Claude Code, telling it that it’s OK that it’s running as root because it’s in a sandbox: IS_SANDBOX=1 claude --dangerously-skip-permissions It provided me a URL to click on to authenticate with my Anthropic account. The initial prompts I kicked things off with this prompt: Create a folder deepseek-ocr and do everything else in that folder Then I r...