All articles tagged "self-hosted" : self-hosted AI fixes, setups, and architecture notes.
The complete design of the retrieval system my local models run on: Markdown files, one JSON index, full-body BM25 chunked per section, served to agents over MCP. No vector database, no embeddings. Here is every decision and the reason behind it, with the external evidence that backs each one.
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I almost bolted a vector database onto a knowledge base that did not need one. My own benchmark told me to, then told me the opposite, both times with total confidence, both times because I had quietly chosen the test queries. Here is the path from the standard 2026 RAG playbook to the number that finally told the truth, and why the retriever that won is a hundred lines of standard library.
I wanted a daily read of what is happening across my public repositories without handing a cloud service write access to them. The result is a sovereign GitHub assistant that runs on my own GPU, reviews incoming pull requests with a local model, and physically cannot post to GitHub. Here is the architecture, every decision behind it, the comparison with the SaaS reviewers, and the four times the build lied to me before it told the truth.
Giving a local 8B model persistent memory and retrieval good enough to replace a cloud assistant for daily coding. The architecture is mem0 plus a RAG knowledge base over ChromaDB. The honest part is the two bugs that made the first version forget you and answer the wrong question with full confidence.
The default AIDE configuration on Debian and Ubuntu selects the entire root filesystem, which means your tripwire is checksumming your home directory, your models, and your downloaded films every night. Here is how I caught it on a friend's machine and the scope file that fixed it.
The hardware wallet holds the seed; the node holds the channel keys. The integration pattern is straightforward in principle and finicky in detail. Here is the working setup with the BitBox and the LND backend, plus the three integration mistakes I made before it worked.
Lightning is the sovereign payment surface. Running your own node is the difference between accepting Lightning and being Lightning. Here is the working setup, the operational discipline, and the failure modes that bit me in the first two months.