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Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

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Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

#111

Post by InitialPhase55 »

lanyard-textile wrote: post #84
InitialPhase55 wrote: post #11

Curious, how did you settle on Haiku/Sonnet? Because there are much cheaper models on OpenRouter that probably perform comparatively... Consider Haiku 4.5: $1/M input tokens | $5/M output tokens vs MiniMax M2.7: $0.30/M input tokens | $1.20/M output tokens vs Kimi K2.5: $0.45/M input tokens | $2.20/M output tokens I haven't tried so I can't say for sure, but from personal experience, I think M2.7 and K2.5 can match H…

Since they're opening it publicly on irc here, the safety rails might be a consideration. I've made an agent recently and that's why I'm paying a premium to Anthropic atm -- Though I'm still experimenting to see if it's really necessary. It's getting some organic usage -- 100M input tokens for just chats this month -- and I've seen enough users try to throw Haiku against the wall and failing to trick it into misbehav…

Good point! Didn't consider that aspect, agree.

Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

#112

Post by upstandingdude »

"It has access to email, deeper personal context [...] If it gets compromised, the blast radius is an IRC bot with a $2/day inference budget."

Dunno, if it gets compromised it has access to ironclaw. So the blast radius is email access and access to personal data. Depending on the setup the blast radius could even be 'the attacker removed the api limits by resetting password and incurred astronomic costs' or worse.

Just tried it, its a public lobby where people see each others questions?! Now the blast radius became 'hosting a public hub that was used to share CP and other illegal materials'

Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

#113

Post by johnisgood »

upstandingdude wrote: post #112

"It has access to email, deeper personal context [...] If it gets compromised, the blast radius is an IRC bot with a $2/day inference budget." Dunno, if it gets compromised it has access to ironclaw. So the blast radius is email access and access to personal data. Depending on the setup the blast radius could even be 'the attacker removed the api limits by resetting password and incurred astronomic costs' or worse. J…

If what you said is true, then it seems like humanity is working as intended if we take away the rails?

Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

#114

Post by upstandingdude »

johnisgood wrote: post #113
upstandingdude wrote: post #112

"It has access to email, deeper personal context [...] If it gets compromised, the blast radius is an IRC bot with a $2/day inference budget." Dunno, if it gets compromised it has access to ironclaw. So the blast radius is email access and access to personal data. Depending on the setup the blast radius could even be 'the attacker removed the api limits by resetting password and incurred astronomic costs' or worse. J…

If what you said is true, then it seems like humanity is working as intended if we take away the rails?

Yeah I mean its over exaggerated but I think the blast radius estimation was way too optimistic.

Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

#115

Post by devin »

upstandingdude wrote: post #112

"It has access to email, deeper personal context [...] If it gets compromised, the blast radius is an IRC bot with a $2/day inference budget." Dunno, if it gets compromised it has access to ironclaw. So the blast radius is email access and access to personal data. Depending on the setup the blast radius could even be 'the attacker removed the api limits by resetting password and incurred astronomic costs' or worse. J…

That has been my comment to folks I know running these OpenClaw agents on Mac Minis. Some of them are very competent generally and are the type of people who I think historically would have told you why you shouldn't just `curl` and run some script to install something. For some reason when it comes to this stuff, when I bring up the possibility of their machine/connection/name/etc. being used for CSAM, they seem undisturbed. It is bizarre.

Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

#116

Post by devin »

upstandingdude wrote: post #114
johnisgood wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what you said is true, then it seems like humanity is working as intended if we take away the rails?

Yeah I mean its over exaggerated but I think the blast radius estimation was way too optimistic.

Good way of putting it, yeah. Do I think it's likely? No. Would I willingly allow for such a scenario to even be possible? Also no.

Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

#117

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #109
georaa wrote: post #106

[flagged]

IRC bouncers have been a thing since forever, at-least-once isn't a technical problem

There's nothing special about an IRC bouncer. They can still get disconnected or get lost in a netsplit.

Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

#120

Post by AgentTax »

abhishekayu wrote: post #94

Interesting setup. The IRC part is neat, but the tiered inference is what stood out. How do you decide when to escalate from Haiku to Sonnet?

Love the sandboxing design. The A2A passthrough where ironclaw borrows nullclaw's inference pipeline is a neat trick — one API key, one billing relationship. Curious how they are logging the split between Haiku and Sonnet spend per session. Once agents start running at any scale that attribution gets messy fast.
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