Self-hosted AI agents,
on your own hardware.
An AI agent is an LLM-powered process with its own tools, memory, and identity. Self-hosting means running that agent on hardware you own — no cloud control plane, no third-party host, no lock-in. tentaflake is an open-source NixOS template that makes it declarative.
Why self-host your agents?
- Privacy. Your prompts, files, and secrets stay on your machine. You bring your own model keys (or run local models); nothing else phones home.
- Isolation. Each agent is contained — a compromised or misbehaving agent can't reach the others' data.
- Ownership. No per-seat pricing, no vendor shutting the service down, no data hostage. It's MIT licensed.
- Reproducibility. The whole host is declared as code, so rebuilding it — or rolling back — is one command.
Real OS-level isolation
tentaflake gives every agent its own 0700 state directory, its own container, and its own agenix-encrypted secrets. That's separation at the operating-system level — not just a different folder in the same compose file. When you'd rather share resources, you can run a team of Hermes agents in one container via Hermes Profiles: separate personas and skills, shared container and runtime.
Three runtimes, one host
Hermes is the default runtime — a local assistant tentacle for coding and everyday tasks. ZeroClaw is an autonomous runtime that publishes its own gateway, suited to research and worker-style agents. OpenCode is a headless coding agent you drive over an HTTP API — the one to reach for when an orchestrator like n8n or CI is calling the shots. Mix as many of each as you like on a single machine — one NixOS brain, many tentacles.
Three ways to start
- Try it live. Boot the live ISO from USB; agents run in RAM and nothing touches disk. Pull the drive and every trace is gone.
- Install permanently. Boot from USB and let the guided installer deploy NixOS + your agents to disk.
- Already on NixOS? Add tentaflake as a flake input to your existing config.
Ready to run your own private agent host?