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Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

blog.jakesaunders.dev

11–20 of 75 posts

Re: Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

#11
post #2

So - apparently it's not fully self-hosted, since I don't see a GPU. I'm interested in hearing from folks who are hosting their own GPU to run coding models. So far my own results are... not great. Seems like frontier models are needed via the big providers?

Check out some NIXOS communities. People they are doing fun crazy stuff, as NixOS is immutable, thus creates separate sandboxes (building/taking down) per agent, etc.

I don't know most of the stuff there, but at least you can dive there.

Re: Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

#14
post #9

I was recently inspired by another article here to start my own. My skills are written and tested, the factory has built the first test project, and I’m setting up the final machine to run it. Here’s my initial post about my motivation and early plans plus some follow-ups, and there are more to come. https://joeldare.com/creating-a-minimal-dark-factory

Just read the intro post, it’s a good read! I’ll read the rest when I get home from work. It’s nice to see others have had the same idea.

Re: Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

#15
Can anyone that has OpenClaw/Hermex experience tell me what it's like working on this over OpenCode served?

On bigger tasks OpenCode sometimes hangs. I'm not sure if that's on the provider side or on my network side, but i sometimes have to stop a subagent because its done but doesnt clean up. I wanted to try Pi, but now I'm wondering if Hermis is a better fit.

Re: Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

#16
post #8
post #2

So - apparently it's not fully self-hosted, since I don't see a GPU. I'm interested in hearing from folks who are hosting their own GPU to run coding models. So far my own results are... not great. Seems like frontier models are needed via the big providers?

We've put almost back in the title above. (Submitted title was "A self hosted AI software factory")

Apologies, I was trying to choose between a snappy title and the whole story.

Re: Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

#17
post #3

It seems at this stage hermes has the upper hand over OpenClaw in people building multi-agent systems. What about hermes do people like above OpenClaw. I'm building a completely different kind of "software factory" called Abject and I'm curious what people are valuing in Hermes above other systems.

Please share a link if its on the internet.

Re: Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

#18

Neat stuff. I use Hermes with the $20/mo ChatGPT Codex integration, myself, as well as Qwen running locally on a 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro to help save my ever-quickly shrinking Codex credits. It's been wonderful for stuff like, say, giving Hermes an account on my Home Assistant server (after taking a backup) and having it make a bunch of configurations, or draw conclusions based on historical sensor data (trying to de…

That’s a great use of Hermes. Had it concluded if your A/C is undersized?

Before this little experiment I generally used it as a very specific search engine for houses, ‘Find me a house in the country but close to amenities with a workshop barn but close enough on the train to Manchester’. It’s great for this!

I’ve never been on the Hermes subreddit I’m gonna go check it out. I agree with the commenter below, it’s fine when I need no record my reps but don’t really care how. It writes tests but I don’t verify. It’s a manual ‘works or it doesn’t’ Thing. I’d never sell the code to anyone.

Re: Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

#19
People who build software factory are in for a disappointing future. Spoken as someone who uses AI day to day for job and personal projects, I've came across a few super gnarly bugs already, ranging from frontend React apps (yes, believe it or not, frontend is far from solved) to embedded that Claude can't solve. Those bugs are feature breaker. My primary skillset is fullstack/frontend leaning, not embedded. Granted, I might be out of depth in embedded/RTOS but I am very qualified to do frontend. Yet I found bugs in those areas that Claude Opus high can't even solve for hours.

I pointed Claude at those for hours and hours, didn't fucking work, ended up creating more and more slop. Until I stepped in and fixed it in a few lines of code. Thankfully with all my AI assisted work, I took time to understand everything so I was able to debug and fix.

The problem for software factory is, that up to a certain point, you'll encounter some nasty bugs that are really important for your features, but you can't ship it because while the AI deals with the 90%, turns out that last remaining 10% are the one that make or break your project. And you need to deal with that remaining 10%. But how can you deal with the remaining 10% if you don't understand that 90% or majority of it?

Also, don't listen to influencers like Kent Dodds or Uncle Bob or Steve Yegge, who advocated for software factory walk away from the code kinda thing. They are already rich, and they sell teaching content, but most importantly, their time in this industry has passed. They are not in the weeds doing enterprise software development anymore.

Their first and primary concern is trying to be relevant to sell courses. They don't care about you. Yes I used to listen to them (though not often), but now not anymore. The world doesn't get better or worse whether they choose to sip margarita on a beach or spin yet another "so many words to say absolutely nothing" video/blogs.

Re: Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

#20
post #2

So - apparently it's not fully self-hosted, since I don't see a GPU. I'm interested in hearing from folks who are hosting their own GPU to run coding models. So far my own results are... not great. Seems like frontier models are needed via the big providers?

My favorite real-world example that I worked on: I created a YouTube documentary series about corruption in a small town in Illinois. This required downloading thousands of hours of government meeting videos from YouTube, transcribing + chunking + embedding, summarizing meeting segments, running a couple passes of validation, then searching for interesting storylines. I also scraped thousands of public documents which exposed campaign finance violations and some truly nefarious stuff going on behind the scenes.

I did 90-95% of the work on this with a local GPU. I still ran Claude and Codex, but they were just writing code to orchestrate API calls against local models, local Whisper, etc. Doing the same with the public cloud would have cost thousands of dollars, instead it cost a few hundred dollars for a frontier lab subscription and tens of dollars for electricity.

I recently got into the DGX Spark and just a month ago, got an AMD Ryzen developer platform. Both are incredibly useful tools for some upcoming projects I'm working on (also related to government corruption), but in my limited experience of trying to run opencode on them, the "good models" are still completely unusable because the system prompt alone requires a minute of thinking.

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