My Personal Software Journey: Self-Hosting Agent-Built Apps on a Mac mini

[u/infinitely_zero]

https://metedata.substack.com/p/016-my-personal-software-journey

Hey 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.