Freedom through Pi in the era of agents

· 1 min read

What I probably like the most about agentic building is the freedom and power to create things that previously were unthinkable for a single person to attempt, let alone knock over in a few hours. The naysayers claim software is dead, but from my perspective there has never been a better time to explore and build.

I am currently very into building small, interesting (I think so anyway) projects that replace deeply engrained SaaS products. Not necessarily because I expect to use them as my daily driver, but just to prove that it's possible. Openhub is current example of this. Sick of Github, want control over your git server? Openhub might just be for you.

But the question is, how do you realistically make these types of things available on the internet. You don't want to pay for the reoccuring cost of an EC2, and cloud servers represent the very thing we are enjoying breaking away from.

My setup is simple, and has an uptime of >99.9%, although your milleage will vary.

  1. Have a Raspberry Pi running on your home network (I had one running as a Plex media server anyway)
  2. Use Cloudflare for your domain nameservers and configure tunneling so that you can use cloudflared to tunnel web traffic onto your Pi without exposing it or any of your network ports to the scary internet.
  3. Deploy your services with systemd and register them with your tunnel.

What are the risks? Most obviously remote execution vulnerabilities on your Pi that could then expand to your network as a whole. IMO this is pretty unlikely and not a reason to not have fun deploying whatever you want to make the internet fun again.

I have a few things running from my Pi today: