Run a self-hosted, sandboxed software factory
Observed in the wild: the builder put Hermes, an agent powered by Codex, on a spare eBay PC with no inbound internet access. The box ran Coolify, Forgejo, self-hosted Firecrawl and Tailscale. It reached a deployed app with no further prompts.
- Agent or tool
- Codex
- Topic
- Productivity
- Reported on
- Hacker News
- Added
- 2026-10-15
Why it matters
Small, repetitive tasks eat more of the week than anyone likes to admit. Cases like this show an agent taking a chore off someone's plate end to end, not just suggesting what to do. It is one of 196 sightings filed under Productivity on Agent Sightings (number 153 by interest), and one of 32 involving Codex.
How you could try it
Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into Codex or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.
Help me run a self-hosted, sandboxed software factory. Break it into steps, show your work, and wait for confirmation before anything irreversible, paid, or outbound.
Tip: Start small: run it once on a low-stakes example, read what the agent did, and only then let it run on real work.
Source
Read the original first-hand account on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49810699. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.