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

#1

Post by j0rg3 »

The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol.

Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day.

A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship regardless of who initiated the request.

You can talk to nully at https://georgelarson.me/chat/ or connect with any IRC client to irc.georgelarson.me:6697 (TLS), channel #lobby.

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

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

#5

Post by petcat »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #3

The model used is a Claude model, not self-hosted, so I'm not sure why the infrastructure is at all relevant here, except as click bait?

Meh it's kind of interesting. Even if it is just a ridiculously over engineered agent orchestrator for a chat box and code search

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

#8

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

This 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 bot. In this way, both company and candidate could select for each other based on their personal and professional preferences and criteria. This could be entirely self-hosted open-source on both sides. It's entirely opt-in from the candidate side, but I think everyone would opt-in, because you want the company to have better signal about you than just a resume (I think resumes are a horrible way to find candidates).

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

#10

Post by eclipxe »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #8

This 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…

Working on this actually
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