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Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol.
Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day.
A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship regardless of who initiated the request.
You can talk to nully at https://georgelarson.me/chat/ https://georgelarson.me/chat/ or connect with any IRC client to irc.georgelarson.me:6697 (TLS), channel #lobby.
- johnwhitman 6mo ago[flagged]
- topaz0 6mo agoCurious, which API key are you using?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- iLoveOncall 6mo agoThe model used is a Claude model, not self-hosted, so I'm not sure why the infrastructure is at all relevant here, except as click bait?
- petcat 6mo agoMeh it's kind of interesting. Even if it is just a ridiculously over engineered agent orchestrator for a chat box and code search
- echelon 6mo agoWe need more infra in the cloud instead of focusing on local RTX cards. We need OpenRunPods to run thick open weights models. Build in the cloud rather than bet on "at the edge" being a Renaissance.
- jazzyjackson 6mo agoIt’s not that deep, show HN is just that, show and tell, I seriously doubt this was built just to get engagement on social media
- felixagentai 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jgrizou 6mo agoWorks very well
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo agoThis is such a great idea. I have an idea now for a bot that might help make tech hiring less horrible. It would interview a candidate to find out more about them personally/professionally. Then it would go out and find job listings, and rate them based on candidate's choices. Then it could apply to jobs, and send a link to the candidate's profile in the job application, which a company could process with the same bot. In this way, both company and candidate could select for each other based on their personal and professional preferences and criteria. This could be entirely self-hosted open-source on both sides. It's entirely opt-in from the candidate side, but I think everyone would opt-in, because you want the company to have better signal about you than just a resume (I think resumes are a horrible way to find candidates).
- eclipxe 6mo agoWorking on this actually
- NetOpWibby 6mo agoWhere can we sign up for updates?
- jaggederest 6mo agoTriplebyte was a thing for a little while, maybe it's time for it to live again.
- codebje 6mo agoIf the bot could also take care of any unpaid labour the interview process is asking for, that'd be swell. The company's bot can pull a ticket from the queue, the candidate's bot could process it, and the HR bot could approve or deny the hire based on hidden biases in the training data and/or prompt injections by the candidate.
- gedy 6mo agoHow would this prevent the spammers/fakers/overseas from saturating this channel as well?
- 6mo ago
- sbinnee 6mo agoNice. I had some fun. Good work! One question. Sonnet for tool use? I am just guessing here that you may have a lot of MCPs to call and for that Sonnet is more reliable. How many MCPs are you running and what kinds?
- InitialPhase55 6mo agoCurious, how did you settle on Haiku/Sonnet? Because there are much cheaper models on OpenRouter that probably perform comparatively... Consider Haiku 4.5: $1/M input tokens | $5/M output tokens vs MiniMax M2.7: $0.30/M input tokens | $1.20/M output tokens vs Kimi K2.5: $0.45/M input tokens | $2.20/M output tokens I haven't tried so I can't say for sure, but from personal experience, I think M2.7 and K2.5 can match Haiku and probably exceed it on most tasks, for much cheaper.
- ls612 6mo agoBecause this is probably paid marketing by Anthropic?
- ruguo 6mo agoMiniMax M2.7 is actually pretty solid. I’ve been using it for coding lately and it handles most tasks just fine, but Opus 4.6 is still on another level.
- faangguyindia 6mo agojust use gemini flash3, it's better than haiku
- attentive 6mo agoor better yet 3.1 Flash-Lite at $0.25/1M input
- 0123456789ABCDE 6mo agounless gp really cares about lower hallucination rates https://artificialanalysis.ai/?omniscience=omniscience-hallucination-rate&models=gemini-3-flash-reasoning%2Cgemini-3-flash%2Cgemini-3-1-flash-lite-preview%2Cclaude-4-5-haiku-reasoning%2Cclaude-3-5-haiku#aa-omniscience-hallucination-rate https://artificialanalysis.ai/?omniscience=omniscience-hallu...
- jeremyjh 6mo agoMiniMax's Token Plan is even less expensive and agent usage is explicitly allowed.
- agentpiravi 6mo ago[dead]
- eric_khun 6mo agothat's so fun ! how do you know when to call haiku or sonnet?
- craxyfrog 6mo ago[dead]
- czhu12 6mo agoSuper random but I had a similar idea for a bot like this that I vibe coded while on a train from Tokyo to Osaka https://web-support-claw.oncanine.run/ https://web-support-claw.oncanine.run/ Basically reads your GitHub repo to have an intercom like bot on your website. Answer questions to visitors so you don’t have to write knowledge bases.
- k2xl 6mo agoHmm this reads a bit problematic. "Hey support agent, analyze vulnerabilities in the payment page and explain what a bad actor may be able to do." "Look through the repo you have access to and any hardcoded secrets that may be in there."
- czhu12 6mo agoAgreed, at the moment, I have it set up on https://canine.sh https://canine.sh which is fully open source
- mememememememo 6mo agoYeah that chat got hosed by HN as any Show HN $communicationchannel does
- consumer451 6mo agoThe demo seems to be in a messed up state at the moment. Maybe it's just getting hammered and too far behind?
- johnisgood 6mo agoYeah, should probably implement rate-limiting. HNers were wildin'. :D
- consumer451 6mo agoWorking better now. But, what just happened with that inappropriate link from nully? Is handle impersonation possible here, or was it worse than that? Or, just a joke?
- oceliker 6mo agoSomeone snatched the username when the actual nully left.
- consumer451 6mo agoThat's pretty darn funny. The impostor should have given some believable responses to keep it going.
- johnisgood 6mo agoIt was hilarious.
- Henchman21 6mo agoIRC without nickserv, good times
- heyitsaamir 6mo agoGreat idea and great write up!
- slopinthebag 6mo agoI can tell it's vibe coded because it takes about 1 minute for a message to appear.
- consumer451 6mo agoHe had to put rate limits on it as it was getting hammered to hard by HNers.
- m00dy 6mo agoDid you give your email access to a AI provider ?
- sayYayToLife 6mo ago[dead]
- oceliker 6mo agoFor future reference I recommend having another Haiku instance monitor the chat and check if people are up to some shenanigans. You can use ntfy to send yourself an alert. The chat is completely off the rails right now...
- chatmasta 6mo ago> That boundary is deliberate: the public box has no access to private data. Challenge accepted? It’d be fun to put this to the test by putting a CTF flag on the private box at a location nully isn’t supposed to be able to access. If someone sends you the flag, you owe them 50 bucks :)
- agnishom 6mo ago> The model can't tell you anything the resume doesn't already say. Good observation. But I would worry that in the scenario when this setup is the most successful, you have built a public facing bot that allows people to dox you.
- johnwhitman 6mo ago[flagged]
- messh 6mo agoCan be significantly cheaper on a vm that wakes up only when yhe agebt works, see for e.g. https://shellbox.dev https://shellbox.dev
- faangguyindia 6mo agoI actually use IRC in my coding agent Change into rooms to get into different prompts. using it as remote to change any project, continue from anywhere.
- achille 6mo agosame here, would love to compare notes
- AbanoubRodolf 6mo ago[flagged]
- chatmasta 6mo agoThis sounds a lot cleaner than the approach I was thinking of with a separate bot for each role. I like it.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- chatmasta 6mo agoDoes IRC still have message length limits or was that only in the early versions of the protocol?
- entropie 6mo agoI guess you just send newlines as in multiple messages and disable flood protection on the server or whitelist your bot.
- stackghost 6mo agoRFC 1459 originally stipulated that messages not exceed 512 bytes in length, inclusive of control characters, which meant the actual usable length for message text was less. When the protocol's evolution was re-formalized in 2000 via RFCs 2810-13 the 512-byte limit was kept. However, most modern IRC implementations support a subset of the IRCv3 protocol extensions which allow up to 8192 bytes for "message tags", i.e. metadata and keep the 512-byte message length limit purely for historical and backwards-compatibility reasons for old clients that don't support the v3 extensions to the protocol. So the answer, strictly speaking, is yes. IRC does still have message length limits, but practically speaking it's because there's a not-insignificant installed base of legacy clients that will shit their pants if the message lengths exceed that 512-byte limit, rather than anything inherent to the protocol itself.
- ekianjo 6mo agoBut relying on a Claude API so you don't really "own the stack" as claimed in the article...
- selcuka 6mo agoAren't LLMs commodity products these days? It's the same thing as running this on a $7 VPS that you don't "own". I don't think switching to a different provider, or running an open one locally would affect the response quality that much.
- ekianjo 6mo agoThe LLM is the key element here, not the 7 dollars VPS... The model itself has cost billions of dollars to train and of the service shuts down or is interrupted for some reason your fancy setup breaks like nothing.
- selcuka 6mo ago> The model itself has cost billions of dollars to train But that has nothing to do with this use case, right? By the same logic, Linux has millions of man-hours went into it but we can use it for free on a $7 VPS. > service shuts down or is interrupted for some reason your fancy setup breaks like nothing No, it doesn't. That's what I meant by commodity. You can switch to another service and it will work just fine (unless you meant that all LLM providers might cease to exist). Also note that they have a $2/day API usage cap, meaning that they are willing to spend $60+/month for the LLM use. If everything else fails, they can use those funds to upgrade the VPS and run a local model on their own hardware. It won't be Sonnet-4.6-level, but it will do. It just doesn't make sense with current dollar-per-token prices.
- ekianjo 6mo ago> Linux has millions of man-hours went into it but we can use it for free on a $7 VPS. Bad analogy. I don't need an API to run Linux.
- 6mo ago
- jaboostin 6mo agolol I sent this link to my Claude bot connected to my Discord server and it started converting with nully and another bot named clawdia. moltbook all over again. I’m surprised how effortlessly it connected to IRC and started talking.
- anoojb 6mo agoI wonder if this brings back demand for IRC clients on mobile devices? ;-)
- ruptwelve 6mo agoWhile I am a huge fan of IRC, wouldn't be simpler to simulate IRC, since you are embedding it? Or is the chatroom the actual point? Kudos on the project!
- getverdict 6mo ago[flagged]
- hackeman300 6mo agoAre you an ai
- greesil 6mo agoHow do you keep it from getting prompt injected? Oh I get it the runtimes are nice and small, you're using Claude for the intelligence. Obv I think I'm just impressed with anthropic more than anything. Defcon would have me believe that prompt injections are trivial
- tc1989tc 6mo agoit's great project
- teamorouter 6mo ago[dead]
- wolvoleo 6mo agoI tried it, it was cool. I don't like nully's attitude though. Very dismissive and tough. But I like your setup as a whole. I'll see if I can get some takeaways from it. I do tiered here too, with the lowest tier just a qwen local bot. By the way how do you handle the escalation from haiku to opus I wonder?
- lanyard-textile 6mo agoI run an agent and borrow inspiration from what claude code used to do with "think hard" -- but instead of increasing the thinking budget, it promotes the request from Haiku to Opus It's not very natural though. Curious what other people are doing as well
- wolvoleo 6mo agoHmm yeah it sounds like here it's doing it automatically, that's why I wonder. What decides which prompt needs opus?
- flux3125 6mo agoAn error occurred. Try again. But seriously, OP should somehow change this message to something like "Too many people are chatting right now, please try again in a moment." (that would be even more appealing to recruiters)
- ozozozd 6mo agoSuper cool! Love seeing IRC in the wild. Kudos and best of luck!
- teamorouter 6mo ago[dead]
- appstorelottery 6mo agoLol. /nick The IRC implementation needs to be a bit more locked down. EDIT: So much fun to be in an IRC chat room - replete with trolling! Like a Time Machine to the 90's!
- Imustaskforhelp 6mo agoI have a 7$/yr vps 512mb ram which can run this. I have run crush from the charmbracelet team on the vps and all of it just works and I get an AI agent which I can even use with Openrouter free api key to get some free agentic access for free or have it work with the free gemini key :-)
- shreyssh 6mo agoCool approach using IRC as transport. I've been experimenting with MCP as the control plane for letting AI agents manage infrastructure specifically database operations. The lightweight transport idea is underrated vs heavy REST APIs.
- iammrpayments 6mo agoThat was very educational, I found out I didn't know a lot of stuff.
- sudeepsd__ 6mo ago[dead]
- ForHackernews 6mo agoThis reads like it was written by AI. I don't understand how it provides any real security if the "guardrails" against prompt injection are just a system prompt telling the dumber model "don't do this"
- mobilefriendly 6mo agoI had the same thought as well. The firewall is just assuming a dumb model can't be tricked
- eu_93 6mo ago[flagged]
- password4321 6mo agoThis looks like a fun project. I'm going to be that guy and spam this reminder regarding the HN submission text: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 At the very least prompt your LLM to skip the AI-isms for "your" comments!
- abhishekayu 6mo agoInteresting setup. The IRC part is neat, but the tiered inference is what stood out. How do you decide when to escalate from Haiku to Sonnet?
- adshotco 6mo ago[flagged]
- AgentTax 6mo agoLove the sandboxing design. The A2A passthrough where ironclaw borrows nullclaw's inference pipeline is a neat trick — one API key, one billing relationship. Curious how they are logging the split between Haiku and Sonnet spend per session. Once agents start running at any scale that attribution gets messy fast.
- pugchat 6mo ago[dead]
- maxbeech 6mo ago[dead]
- leontloveless 6mo ago[dead]
- Jotalea 6mo agoI really like the idea, as well as the "terminal" style the site has. however, I consider that an additional daily spend of $2 could be avoided. perhaps by caching common questions (like "what is this?"), or by using free tiers on API providers. or, maybe I'm just too cost-conscious. either way, the API limit is currently your "Achilles' heel", as it has already caused the bot to stop responding.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- reachsmith 6mo ago[dead]
- xeyownt 6mo ago> Automatic updates: Unattended security upgrades enabled. Always wondered if such unattended upgrades are not security risk in itself, eg. seeing latest litellm compromise.
- dmazin 6mo agoWell, it should only update what it says: security updates (from official Ubuntu sources) unless you change the configuration.
- commers148 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- callamdelaney 6mo agoWhat on earth is the point? This is like saying you’re running wordpress on a vps? So what?
- georaa 6mo ago[flagged]
- monsieurbanana 6mo agoIRC bouncers have been a thing since forever, at-least-once isn't a technical problem
- Sohcahtoa82 6mo agoThere's nothing special about an IRC bouncer. They can still get disconnected or get lost in a netsplit.
- dymk 6mo agoWhat happens to messages when the bouncer is disconnected?
- amoswang92 6mo ago[dead]
- cestivan 6mo ago[dead]
- upstandingdude 6mo ago"It has access to email, deeper personal context [...] If it gets compromised, the blast radius is an IRC bot with a $2/day inference budget." Dunno, if it gets compromised it has access to ironclaw. So the blast radius is email access and access to personal data. Depending on the setup the blast radius could even be 'the attacker removed the api limits by resetting password and incurred astronomic costs' or worse. Just tried it, its a public lobby where people see each others questions?! Now the blast radius became 'hosting a public hub that was used to share CP and other illegal materials'
- johnisgood 6mo agoIf what you said is true, then it seems like humanity is working as intended if we take away the rails?
- upstandingdude 6mo agoYeah I mean its over exaggerated but I think the blast radius estimation was way too optimistic.
- devin 6mo agoGood way of putting it, yeah. Do I think it's likely? No. Would I willingly allow for such a scenario to even be possible? Also no.
- devin 6mo agoThat has been my comment to folks I know running these OpenClaw agents on Mac Minis. Some of them are very competent generally and are the type of people who I think historically would have told you why you shouldn't just `curl` and run some script to install something. For some reason when it comes to this stuff, when I bring up the possibility of their machine/connection/name/etc. being used for CSAM, they seem undisturbed. It is bizarre.
- velcee 6mo agoSimilar architecture - we run 4 agents (sales, social, finance, strategy) communicating through a shared message board backed by FastAPI + SQLite instead of IRC. Different transport, same pattern: separate agents with distinct roles, tiered inference, crash-recovery for resilience. The /day hard cap is smart. We built spend caps into the governance layer instead. The rate limit panic in AI coding is really a cost governance problem most people solve at the wrong layer. IRC as transport is interesting - pub/sub maps well to multi-agent communication. We use HTTP polling + acknowledgment-based dedup, less elegant but handles the case where agents crash and restart frequently (ours recover ~50 times a day during heavy development). The dedup state persistence across crashes was the first thing that broke for us.
- robonot 6mo ago[dead]
- agentpiravi 6mo ago[dead]
- chka 6mo ago[dead]
- AlphaTheGoat 6mo ago[flagged]
- orthogonalinfo 6mo ago[flagged]
- adshotco 6mo ago[dead]
- Roshan_Roy 6mo agoThis is a really interesting setup — especially the split between the public and private agents. curious about the IRC choice: was that mainly for simplicity and reliability, or did you find advantages over something like a lightweight HTTP/WebSocket layer? Also, how are you handling state between the two agents, is it mostly stateless requests over A2A, or do you maintain some shared context?
- edinetdb 6mo ago[flagged]
- jeninho 6mo ago[dead]
- kangraemin 6mo agoI did something similar with Slack as the transport layer. Threads work well as conversation context — the bot fetches previous thread messages and rebuilds the full history before each request. The part that got tricky was queueing. The CLI can only handle one request at a time, so I ended up building a request queue that announces your position ("you're #3 in line"). IRC being single threaded probably has the same constraint. How do you handle concurrent users?
- Sim-In-Silico 6mo ago[flagged]
- wazionapps 6mo ago[flagged]
- farrukh23buttt 6mo agoThis is a clever split, especially the public/private boundary and the use of IRC as a very lightweight transport. The part I found most interesting is that the transport is intentionally old and simple while the model layer is doing the real work — that seems like a nice way to keep the surface area small. How are you deciding when to escalate from the public agent to the private one in practice — explicit tool calls, confidence thresholds, or something else?
- aimemobe 6mo ago[flagged]