Does anyone run their own AI service?
If so,
Which one?
What hardware?
Do you have a way to access it from outside or from a phone?
And, if you’re open to sharing, what do you do with it?
I know AI-enabling hardware is insanely expensive right now, but some of the smaller (<32GB) more efficient models (think deepseek- or qwen-based) don’t absolutely need specialized hardware to run and perform well enough for many purposes.
I am so aware of the absolutely abysmal privacy practices of basically all AI companies that I’m not comfortable using them to help me with web searches and the such, because there’s no way that all this information won’t be going into a profile. This makes me want to have my own “helper” service.



Yes, with OpenClaw I can expose my agents via discord apps on my home discord server, I like that route because of the rich media and UI options (agents can give me drop down selector lists and approve/reject buttons). I have two 24gb Nvidia cards for local models usually Qwen, Mistral, and nemo based models for different purposes. I can chat with the agents anywhere I’m logged into discord and I expose privileged control surfaces and nodes via tailscale and family/shared endpoints via caddy and cloudflared
What are the agents doing for you?
not laundry unfortunately
I’m exhausted from writing poetry all the time I want something that can do that for me.
So one thing that’s really helpful to automate is checking all the repos for my self hosted stacks and testing/validating/deploying new versions when they come out. They’re also good at writing helper scripts in Python to automate things deterministically so I don’t have to keep using LLMs for it. There’s an agent that is focused on learning and managing my wife’s school schedule, ingests her grades and syllabi and reviews her homework and makes helpful 10 minute podcasts on concepts she’s struggling with in her engineering program (not notebookLM, a self hosted lookalike), there’s a domestic agent that accepts uploads of grocery receipts and does our meal planning and schedules time for meal prep and chores and divides it up between us and the kids depending on everyone’s calendars, there’s a home media agent that manages qbittorrent and my ratios on private torrent trackers and files new manga or TV shows or movies ebooks audiobooks etc in the right library when new things come out we might like, viewing/reading/watching metadata tells the agent what content is popular to queue up in the next sweep - there’s a home assistant front door agent that can make automations or report sensor state or trigger scenes or entities in the general text channel of our home discord server and can tell me where my phone or keys are thanks to ESPresence being able to use cheap ATOM esp boards throughout the house (tiny little USB powered things with Bluetooth and wifi) to triangulate the location of any watched Bluetooth device or tracker tag in 3 dimensions through floors and walls - what else…there’s a home security red-team agent that looks for security holes in my cloudflare tunnel/kv worker/tailscale/caddy/protonVPN routes and monitors a cyber security RSS feed, I have a job/market research bot that ingests another RSS feed for news relevant to my industry and organization and gives me email and voice briefings on new regulations and corporate leadership signals, stuff like that. What else… there’s a game dev bot where my kids can talk to a discord bot that routes to a game dev agent that has Godot MCP and Unity MCP and renpy MCP and lots of other fun tools like Roblox MCP and Minecraft to make custom games we can deploy on Google cloud for their friends to play (my daughter is really into visual novels for some reason I don’t get it) - all sorts of fun stuff. Discord is kind of the family shared interface and then the privileged control planes are routed to my phone through tailscale and the home media server stacks are exposed through cloudflared.
I’m confused about some of these. For example everything you mentioned in the torrent agent (maintaining ratios, watching for new media, seeing what’s popular) are already settings in the *arr suite that uses significantly fewer resources, no?
This is all basic functionality of Home Assistant, yes? I’m confused about what is the agent is doing?