Comment by jaboostin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaboostin | Hacker News Reader

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My friends and I have been running a similar homegrown system on a VM at home: Claude Code in a GNU screen managed by systemd, Cloudflare tunnels, Graphiti memory system, a Discord channel plugged into Claude to drive it, and Temporal for all sorts of workflows and crons that it builds on its own.

It arrived at the same incredibly fun behavior as you talk about in the readme, where the agent just builds all sorts of junk for you autonomously. It has built dozens of web apps, static pages, mini games, etc. all tied back into a central domain that I gave it. I truly have no idea what the system or code looks like but it’s been so much fun just letting it build.

The “For People Who Don't Write Code” is so true as well. We have someone in discord that has never written code but they can ask the agent to build virtually anything, it goes off and churns, then pops back with a link to it running live. It’s honestly been so much fun with friends, highly recommend trying it out.

This is awesome to hear. The "I truly have no idea what the system or code looks like but it's been so much fun just letting it build" resonates hard. That's exactly the experience we had too.

The "For People Who Don't Write Code" angle has been the biggest surprise for us. We had a non-technical user ask for a Chrome extension and the agent built it, packaged it as a zip, and sent the download link. No terminal, no dev environment needed.

If you ever want to formalize your setup, we built Specter (https://github.com/ghostwright/specter) to provision VMs with DNS, TLS, and systemd in under 90 seconds. Makes spinning up new instances trivial. Would love to hear more about your Graphiti memory setup, that's a different approach than our Qdrant-based system.

Graphiti is interesting because it’s ingesting episodes (discord chat messages), extracting facts and relationships, and then allows the agent to query that back, keeping the relationships in tact. So rather than a flat list of vectors related to a search term, the agent can essentially walk from one fact/concept to another. While plain vector search says something exists, the edges in the graph denote how/why it exists and provide extra context.

It’s a bit frightening in practice because it starts building up “knowledge” of what everyone in our group is interested in (games, hobbies, food) and their personalities, politics, etc. Sonnet 4.6 in particular tends to query the graph and make jokes, matching the vibe on discord.

On a more serious use-case: it also stores system topology in the graph so, while it does document the system in various READMEs and CLAUDE.md files, the graph provides a fast at a glance reference for how the systems interact. I have no evidence but I imagine this could be useful and more dense / token efficient than massive documentation, even for products, features, etc.

Oh I actually just looked at Graphiti and it looks really cool. I will try to see if Phantom can utilize this. Great work you guys

> I truly have no idea what the system or code looks like

Does it not concern you if it installed a compromised package, vulnerable exploit, or it has something exposed and leaking everything to an attacker?

I understand that your personal account is removed from it, but still, it has a direct link to you, and an attacker could be just building up towards it stealthily to hit when the time is right, maybe it gains SSH into your VM or whatever

eh I can nuke the VM and start fresh. Everything is in git anyway. As for sensitive data, it has its own accounts and no credit cards etc so the blast radius feels limited. I would say this is a fundamental impediment to being used in serious use-cases but for some friends messing around I’m not worried.

It could have installed say, that vulnerable version of litellm, and the entire VM is compromised. But it’s on an isolated vlan anyway so the worst it can really do is use bandwidth and maybe hurt my IP reputation? I could move it to a cloud VM but the risks seem minimal at the moment. I’m definitely not advocating for no defense in depth, but npm install in an isolated VM feels safer than npm install on my work laptop these days :-)

> I would say this is a fundamental impediment to being used in serious use-cases

Fair point, so it's really a fancy tamagotchi you got there I guess haha

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