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

georgelarson.me

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

#121

Post by velcee »

Similar architecture - we run 4 agents (sales, social, finance, strategy) communicating through a shared message board backed by FastAPI + SQLite instead of IRC. Different transport, same pattern: separate agents with distinct roles, tiered inference, crash-recovery for resilience.

The /day hard cap is smart. We built spend caps into the governance layer instead. The rate limit panic in AI coding is really a cost governance problem most people solve at the wrong layer.

IRC as transport is interesting - pub/sub maps well to multi-agent communication. We use HTTP polling + acknowledgment-based dedup, less elegant but handles the case where agents crash and restart frequently (ours recover ~50 times a day during heavy development). The dedup state persistence across crashes was the first thing that broke for us.

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

#122

Post by nickthegreek »

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…

Agreed and I feel like this is a commonly overlooked and important point. Once you have people who are not you interacting with these bots, the necessity of using a sota model to protect against multi step attacks increases. I don't believe IRC provides a layer for ignoring a user and not letting their commands continue to be received.

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

#129

Post by Roshan_Roy »

This is a really interesting setup — especially the split between the public and private agents. curious about the IRC choice: was that mainly for simplicity and reliability, or did you find advantages over something like a lightweight HTTP/WebSocket layer? Also, how are you handling state between the two agents, is it mostly stateless requests over A2A, or do you maintain some shared context?
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