Cool approach using IRC as transport. I've been experimenting with MCP as the control plane for letting AI agents manage infrastructure specifically database operations. The lightweight transport idea is underrated vs heavy REST APIs.
Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
81–90 of 137 posts
Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
#82That was very educational, I found out I didn't know a lot of stuff.
Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
#83[dead]
Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
#84Curious, 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 misbehaving. It "pumps the breaks" a lot and imitates annoyance when you ask it repeatedly :) Handles emotionally driven real-life questions mid-conversation well. It just works.
Not seeing all that consistently with other models I've tried so far -- but I've assumed it's not a completely fair comparison with (e.g.) open weights, since these safety rails are presumably not always arising from the natural model calls.
Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
#85I tried it, it was cool. I don't like nully's attitude though. Very dismissive and tough. But I like your setup as a whole. I'll see if I can get some takeaways from it. I do tiered here too, with the lowest tier just a qwen local bot. By the way how do you handle the escalation from haiku to opus I wonder?
I run an agent and borrow inspiration from what claude code used to do with "think hard" -- but instead of increasing the thinking budget, it promotes the request from Haiku to Opus
It's not very natural though. Curious what other people are doing as well
Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
#86I tried it, it was cool. I don't like nully's attitude though. Very dismissive and tough. But I like your setup as a whole. I'll see if I can get some takeaways from it. I do tiered here too, with the lowest tier just a qwen local bot. By the way how do you handle the escalation from haiku to opus I wonder?
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But seriously, OP should somehow change this message to something like "Too many people are chatting right now, please try again in a moment."
(that would be even more appealing to recruiters)
Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
#87Curious, 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…
just use gemini flash3, it's better than haiku
unless gp really cares about lower hallucination rates
https://artificialanalysis.ai/?omniscience=omniscience-hallu...
Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
#88This is such a great idea. I have an idea now for a bot that might help make tech hiring less horrible. It would interview a candidate to find out more about them personally/professionally. Then it would go out and find job listings, and rate them based on candidate's choices. Then it could apply to jobs, and send a link to the candidate's profile in the job application, which a company could process with the same bo…
> Then it could apply to jobs Almost every job application has its own UI style. Without training the bot on many different job sites, not sure how it can apply to all those jobs.
It uses ARIA labels? If they're not present then it sends a message to a lawyer agent to start a case with a judge agent to sue for breaches of disability a11y legislation.
Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
#89This reads like it was written by AI. I don't understand how it provides any real security if the "guardrails" against prompt injection are just a system prompt telling the dumber model "don't do this"
Re: Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
#90I tried it, it was cool. I don't like nully's attitude though. Very dismissive and tough. But I like your setup as a whole. I'll see if I can get some takeaways from it. I do tiered here too, with the lowest tier just a qwen local bot. By the way how do you handle the escalation from haiku to opus I wonder?
I run an agent and borrow inspiration from what claude code used to do with "think hard" -- but instead of increasing the thinking budget, it promotes the request from Haiku to Opus It's not very natural though. Curious what other people are doing as well
Hmm yeah it sounds like here it's doing it automatically, that's why I wonder. What decides which prompt needs opus?