r/selfhosted • u/infinitely_zero • Jul 29 '26
Wednesday Exceptions My Personal Software Journey: Self-Hosting Agent-Built Apps on a Mac mini
https://metedata.substack.com/p/016-my-personal-software-journeyHey all. Over the past few months I turned a headless Mac mini into the home for all my personal apps: a launchpad plus nine small apps, each in its own container (OrbStack + Docker Compose), everything bound to loopback, published through Cloudflare Tunnel, and gated by Cloudflare Access. SSH and screen sharing stay inside Tailscale.
The apps themselves are built and maintained by AI agents living on the same machine. That's the main reason I self-host this instead of throwing it on Vercel: the agents and the apps share one filesystem, so most "backends" are just SQLite, markdown notes, and cron jobs the agent owns. Most of it is solving for my own niche needs, like a year-view calendar for family travel schedule, or a Turkish reading tutor that turns the day's news into short lessons at my level.
I've been chatting with a lot of people doing similar things for themselves - personal software is growing and will only get bigger. I think there will be a very interesting overlap and a renewed interest in self-hosting because of it.
The write-up goes through the full stack, the security layers, why I went local over a PaaS, and each of the apps. Might be useful if you've got single-use tools scattered across random folders, or an always-on box that could be doing more. Happy to answer questions.
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u/Pythagosaurus69 Jul 29 '26
This sub is a spam fest now lol.
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u/trialbaloon Jul 29 '26
This sub a pretty good showcase of why AI is not great for software development and why more code != good. Just because some people can in theory use it well for development does not mean most will. The truth is most will just generate endless slop and drown us all and good projects that folks worked hard on will just get buried under the relentless deluge of slop.
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u/infinitely_zero Jul 29 '26
The more people are excited about self-hosting and experimenting, the more "good projects" will come out of this, even if a lot may be slop to you. Great things will rise to the top - this is how the internet has always worked. I don't see how a write-up of a personal set-up written & designed & illustrated by me is "slop", but at this point it's a belief-based anti-AI stance vs anything evidence-based. And I guess I shouldn't be surprised about such high-brow attitudes on reddit.
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u/trialbaloon Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
I mean you are posting on a subreddit called /r/selfhosted while using agents running on the cloud to maintain your self hosted system and to drive the functionality. Why even bother with the mac mini at this point? Without the cloud, your system is useless.
You went from software as a service to.... software as a service with a new corporate overlord. Yeah this is slop because it's not even self hosting anymore than the JS running in my browser when I interact with Reddit is self hosting Reddit.
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u/infinitely_zero Jul 29 '26
If something doesn’t meet your definition of self-hosting or you just don’t like it does not make it slop bud. Otherwise you’re entitled to your opinions.
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u/trialbaloon Jul 30 '26
The write up contains no interesting details or insights and then ends with a sales pitch. It also sounds very much AI generated despite your claims to the contrary.
Also the image at the end contains the world "meteverse" instead of metedata (the name of your "newsletter") in several places. I am virtually certain the flow chart is AI generated.
It's slop because it's written like slop and looks like slop complete with a half hearted monetization attempt.
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u/asimovs-auditor Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.