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

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

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.

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.

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.

Maybe I missed it but what AI model did you use for this?

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.