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 building the final machine to host it. Here’s my initial post about my motivation and early plans plus some follow-ups, and there are more to come.
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?
1) I have knowledge DB that I query, spend a lot of time to get "query N models, stream to me all N results, let me pick which one" - only to find out that qwen beat all other contenders (those were picked before I got R9700, so the rest is =<8B parameters)
2) Setup OpenCode to use it and gave it a few tasks:
- first task (new feature to my MCP) took 40 minutes to complete with zero input from me, while it took 20 for sonnet-5 and sonnet-5 kept bugging me. Results are near identical.
- second task (port a specific version of a package to my flake) it got stuck in a hilarious loop where model already been told what hash to use by nix itself, but it wanted to figure our how to get hash another way for some reason.
- third task (another task, but much harder than first one with most of the discovery already done), kept doing discovery and running out of context, went through 3 compactions (256k context is what I can fit on R9700). Room got too hot, so I stopped it.
3) virtual assistant like Hermes but my own: no notes, works great.
I'm pretty sure codding issues are just harness and lack of memory that Claude Code already had. Pretty nice setup, similar to mine but I built my own lightweight PaaS that is highly specific to what I run.
I have a similar setup to the OP (although I'm not sure if I'd call it a "software factory"), and I utilize a local model for some aspects of the setup. Specifically, I have a single RTX 3090 Ti with 24GB VRAM on my (main) home server, and I've been primarily running Qwen 3.6 35B A3B out of it via Ollama (I just switched to Qwen 3.8 27B, though, and I've also tried other Qwen models as well as Gemma models).
The Qwen models are decent, but they don't come close to the full Claude experience I've come to expect. As such, I only use the local models for specific tasks where it makes sense to do so. Really the setup is that my Claude-powered agents are able to incorporate my local model into work it builds out. The agents can perform inference against the Ollama API as they see fit, and I encourage them to do so for tasks where (a) the low-level capacity of the local models make sense and/or (b) where costs can become a concern.
It seems to work well when it comes into play (like having Claude drive a web browsing session but letting Qwen handle much of the actual browser interactions, image analysis, etc.). Still, Qwen just isn't smart enough (or fast enough on my machine) to handle anything agentic that isn't non-trivial.
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 determine if my A/C is undersized by feeding Hermes all the capabilities of my system, size of house, and letting it pull room temp sensor data from HA is one project I did recently), is absolutely fantastic. It also spins me up little webapps for things like a very me-specific RSS reader, a "to do" checklist that references my email (and archives said emails when I mark an item off the list), and various little internal IT tools and report generators.
The Hermes subreddit is a curious place where every second person has quick their $300k a year job and is making a living off of Hermes doing... something? They treat themselves as the CEO of a bunch of agentic employees and have AI generated infographics of their "Stack" (all hail the mighty Stack) and everybody stands in a circle and applauds the most convoluted Hermes setups you've ever seen with not a single word how any of this is supposedly making anybody any money.
Are people developing like this? Are people asking money for something they one-shot instructions to an orchestration agent which delegated to fifteen other agents in Kanban and then spat out something that "works"? Every project I've ever had an LLM do a majority of the work for me has been strictly for my personal use; I'd never let anyone else use this stuff because it doesn't pass the vibe check. When a new frontier model comes out I'll pass the previous frontier model's work past the new model and let it tear it to shreds and see what improvements could be made for shits, giggles, and to waste a week's worth of tokens in the course of thirty minutes, but Reddit is overflowing with seeming non-coders who are passing this 100% organic slop off as sellable product?
In my experience agentic sw development delivers if you are not too picky with the details or if you don't notice what's not done according to your instructions. If you want exactly what you had in mind, the last 10% might last a very long time and cost many tokens. More or less like working with humans.
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.
People assemble projects from a collection of buzzwords these days without understanding the underlying technology. Did he need to use tailscale to interact with the box remotely? No. But, it's what a google search will tell you to do.
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 building the final machine to host 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
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")
I recently picked up R9700 to run Qwen 3.8-27B.
1) I have knowledge DB that I query, spend a lot of time to get "query N models, stream to me all N results, let me pick which one" - only to find out that qwen beat all other contenders (those were picked before I got R9700, so the rest is =<8B parameters)
2) Setup OpenCode to use it and gave it a few tasks:
I'm pretty sure codding issues are just harness and lack of memory that Claude Code already had. Pretty nice setup, similar to mine but I built my own lightweight PaaS that is highly specific to what I run.I have a similar setup to the OP (although I'm not sure if I'd call it a "software factory"), and I utilize a local model for some aspects of the setup. Specifically, I have a single RTX 3090 Ti with 24GB VRAM on my (main) home server, and I've been primarily running Qwen 3.6 35B A3B out of it via Ollama (I just switched to Qwen 3.8 27B, though, and I've also tried other Qwen models as well as Gemma models).
The Qwen models are decent, but they don't come close to the full Claude experience I've come to expect. As such, I only use the local models for specific tasks where it makes sense to do so. Really the setup is that my Claude-powered agents are able to incorporate my local model into work it builds out. The agents can perform inference against the Ollama API as they see fit, and I encourage them to do so for tasks where (a) the low-level capacity of the local models make sense and/or (b) where costs can become a concern.
It seems to work well when it comes into play (like having Claude drive a web browsing session but letting Qwen handle much of the actual browser interactions, image analysis, etc.). Still, Qwen just isn't smart enough (or fast enough on my machine) to handle anything agentic that isn't non-trivial.
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 determine if my A/C is undersized by feeding Hermes all the capabilities of my system, size of house, and letting it pull room temp sensor data from HA is one project I did recently), is absolutely fantastic. It also spins me up little webapps for things like a very me-specific RSS reader, a "to do" checklist that references my email (and archives said emails when I mark an item off the list), and various little internal IT tools and report generators.
The Hermes subreddit is a curious place where every second person has quick their $300k a year job and is making a living off of Hermes doing... something? They treat themselves as the CEO of a bunch of agentic employees and have AI generated infographics of their "Stack" (all hail the mighty Stack) and everybody stands in a circle and applauds the most convoluted Hermes setups you've ever seen with not a single word how any of this is supposedly making anybody any money.
Are people developing like this? Are people asking money for something they one-shot instructions to an orchestration agent which delegated to fifteen other agents in Kanban and then spat out something that "works"? Every project I've ever had an LLM do a majority of the work for me has been strictly for my personal use; I'd never let anyone else use this stuff because it doesn't pass the vibe check. When a new frontier model comes out I'll pass the previous frontier model's work past the new model and let it tear it to shreds and see what improvements could be made for shits, giggles, and to waste a week's worth of tokens in the course of thirty minutes, but Reddit is overflowing with seeming non-coders who are passing this 100% organic slop off as sellable product?
I need fewer morals.
In my experience agentic sw development delivers if you are not too picky with the details or if you don't notice what's not done according to your instructions. If you want exactly what you had in mind, the last 10% might last a very long time and cost many tokens. More or less like working with humans.
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.
People assemble projects from a collection of buzzwords these days without understanding the underlying technology. Did he need to use tailscale to interact with the box remotely? No. But, it's what a google search will tell you to do.