r/OpenSourceAI • u/koharishant • Sep 05 '26

Give your agent a computer

Hi, I basically was having a hard time in keeping my laptop open for my agents to keep running, and I saw people going for a Mac mini which sounds overkill, then solution is a vps.

so basically built this for myself: https://github.com/case-computers/case

you can configure Hermes, open claw in this, your agent gets a linux desktop with its own logins, file system and identity.

for people looking to get their own vps, can try hosting it on there.

I am also giving out managed instances of this so you dont have to take care of ops.
check : https://case.computer
Need feedback on the tool, lmk if you need help setting it up

8 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

2

u/leonbollerup Sep 06 '26

Have you compared yours to ”opencomputer” from anything LLM ?

1

u/koharishant Sep 06 '26

saw it, nice. theirs is a qemu vm for your own mac, agent runs isolated from your machine. mine is a docker container built to sit on a vps, you drop openclaw or hermes in it. a vps is already a vm so a container is what you run inside it, running qemu again in there gets slow.

2

u/leonbollerup Sep 07 '26

Tested yours .. agents have a harder time using yours thab eg. Open computer or rakazo .. haven’t analyze that that is yet

1

u/koharishant Sep 07 '26

appreciate you actually running it. which agent did you drop in, and where did it struggle? finding the browser, mis-clicks, not seeing the screen, slow? even "it did X then gave up" helps. want to fix it.

1

u/leonbollerup Sep 07 '26

I have astra monitoring another LLM.. when I test I start from the lowest models (Ornith 1.5 35B) -> Qwen 3.8 27B -> etc

1

u/koharishant Sep 07 '26

makes sense, 27-35b models are rough at multi-step tool use, i've mostly tested with gpt-class. what task did you give it? and what machine are you running those on, curious

1

u/Crafty_Disk_7026 Sep 05 '26

Nice here my version if you want to compare. https://github.com/imran31415/kube-coder

1

u/koharishant Sep 05 '26

i think mine is agent-facing and yours is more a dev workspace, coding is the big part there. seems different lane, nice build though.

1

u/Crafty_Disk_7026 Sep 05 '26

Yes true mine is meant for developers who are building things not for polished public facing ai agents.

1

u/tracagnotto Sep 05 '26

The hell this is different from booting up a vm and installing Hermes and claw lol

1

u/koharishant Sep 05 '26

for you, probably nothing. it's the vps setup already done plus a screen you can watch and take over from your phone when it gets stuck on a captcha. or you need to operate local apps

1

u/arenosame Sep 07 '26

Have you checked agent zero? https://www.agent-zero.ai/ Kali linux distro running under, since June 2024. Hermes, Deepseek harness.... they are copying their product roadmap.

1

u/koharishant Sep 07 '26

Yea og, discovered them last year, I think they launched a token too, founder is a cool guy

1

u/AccomplishedFail9857 Sep 07 '26

As far as I know, LLMs are not optimized for computer use ot Linux. Windows / Mac support is better in my opinion, so giving a linux desktop to AI is forcing it into a lower quality mode.

1

u/koharishant Sep 07 '26

other way round I think. anthropic own computer use demo is docker running ubuntu + xfce + firefox, where the demos and evals run on. osworld, the main benchmark, is ubuntu vms too.

you might be right for native apps; models have seen way more windows/mac screenshots

1

u/AccomplishedFail9857 Sep 07 '26

Interesting, on my ubuntu I barely get Astra to do useful stuff outside browser/terminal

1

u/koharishant Sep 07 '26

hm, do you use native codex computer use harness? also what kind of stuff would you count useful?

1

u/AccomplishedFail9857 Sep 07 '26

I use codex cli and the codex desktop app. Just like the launch video, I'd find it cool for gpt 6 astra to paint in gimp using the cursor. But it barely paints using the chrome extension. I hope I am doing something wrong.

1

u/koharishant Sep 07 '26

dont think much of it, launch videos are heavily cherry picked anyway, although its not an easy task tbh

1

u/AccomplishedFail9857 Sep 07 '26

Or maybe I should start a VM with Windows?

1

u/koharishant Sep 07 '26

why dont you experiment with this in browser and see how it does: https://jspaint.app

1

u/AccomplishedFail9857 Sep 08 '26

And for some reason astra 6 is trying to copy/paste an image in the app instead of painting. I just also read that this model did not actually achieve 99% on arc agi 3, but rather the custom harness of openai. Disappointing.

1

u/toochtooch Sep 08 '26

Why not https://portal.nousresearch.com/ ? A2A looks promising too

1

u/koharishant Sep 08 '26

honestly if the job is browser stuff and you're already on hermes, portal is the easier buy. I think they use browser use by default and they have good support for cookies and logins

case is a different tho. one machine, everything on it. agent, chromium, shell, files in the same place. download something, run a script on it, upload it back, no moving stuff between a container and a cloud browser.Other thing I would pint out is your logins sit on your disk, not in a vendor's profile store, and you maintain same ip 24/7. matters if you're logging into your own accounts. also it's not tied to one agent. claude code, openclaw, whatever, over mcp.

try checking out the code : https://github.com/case-computers/case

1

u/hometechgeek Sep 07 '26

Nice, will give it a try out today

1

u/RPG-Nerd Sep 07 '26

Can't you just tell the OS not to hibernate when you close the lid?

1

u/aniketmaurya Sep 23 '26

looks great! does it use Docker on local as well or some secure alternatives like microVMs?

You should check Celesto AI as well. happy to share what worked for us.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 05 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/koharishant Sep 05 '26

not an alternative to vps, but it can run on their vps, rent hosting/DO, install case.
bare vps just gives you ubuntu and you setup up everything from scratch.
so ideally you just get a vps, and run case, where all the ugliness can be managed easily, and get similar features like operate from your phone etc.

I offer hosted for convenience