// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory
tl;dr: It worked! From one prompt it created a repo, wrote the application and tests, got CI green, provisioned
Postgres and deployed the finished app behind HTTPS without another message from me.If you just wanna see the outcome
you can find a demo video at the bottom
LLMs got fun again! Maybe they always were and I was just stuck in the trough of disillusionment. Lately, whenever I
need a little tool, I just build it.
I was in the gym the other day and wanted a weights tracker. The app I had in mind was about as CRUD-y as it gets, but
all the app store versions wanted £12 per month, so I just one-shotted one with Claude. Great fun, but giving an LLM
root access to my machine in auto mode still doesn’t sit right with me.
So, the challenge: how can I create a fully remote agentic development environment where we structurally contain the LLM
rather than just trusting it? I want to give it an instruction and have it autonomously move through the
whole SDLC:
All on my home server, without another cloud infrastructure bill. The only ongoing cost specific to this experiment is
a £20 Codex sub.
The one at the bottom is a 2014 dual-core i3 I’ve been running as a homelab for five years. It’s valiantly hosting this
blog and about 45 other Docker containers, from Pi-hole to a full Prometheus / Loki / Grafana stack. It also has port
443 forwarded from my router. I’d be miffed if an LLM broke it, so that’s not what we’re using today.
The top one is a 2021 10th-gen i7 with 32GB RAM, bought fresh from eBay with nothing on it. Perfect.
The core development stack is self-hosted through Coolify. Inference and integrations like Tailscale, Telegram, DNS and
ACME still leave the box. You could host inference too, but I don’t have the hardware and I’d rather OpenAI subsidise
my experiments.
This isn’t a full how-to guide. I could probably write an Ansible one-shot script to set it all up; leave an issue on
the GitHub repo below if you’d like one. If you’ve read this far, though, you can probably figure it out.
The first guardrail is obvious: it’s on its own metal. Hermes could rm -rf / and at worst it would cost me a couple
of hours rebuilding it.