Tools

💡
These are the tools I really use.

AI tools

🧮
Strictly speaking, we don't have "AI", but tools that compile natural language to a result. I prefer open-weight, open-source, and low-cost models with customized and self-defined workflows.

OpenCode TUI and Desktop

OpenCode | The open source AI coding agent
OpenCode - The open source coding agent.
OpenCode
As powerful as Codex or Claude Desktop, 40x cheaper. MCP and Skills support. Customizable.
Coding, admin, and general knowledge tasks can be supported with OpenCode
AI Skills for strategic foresight, intelligence analysis and investigation theory
AI Skills for decision intelligence and visualization.
Because SecurityMarius Ciepluch

Hermes

Hermes Agent — The Agent That Grows With You
An open-source agent that grows with you. Install it, give it your messaging accounts, and it becomes a persistent personal agent.
Nous Research
Hermes, the moment of Business AI
Hermes is just the messenger. To understand the message, you must read it in the right context. And that is where Business AI comes in.
Simple Self-hostingMarius C

Hermes Web is a feature-rich Web UI. The self-learning lends itself well to ad hoc jobs, dashboarding with PyCafe or mindset / decision intelligence tasks.

Self-hosting

🌪️
Self-hosting is a matter of experience. Goog level systems for the masses need to run on Kube, but for SMBs or growing systems, simple solutions can be better.

Proxmox CE

Proxmox Server Solutions
Proxmox develops powerful and efficient open-source server solutions like the Proxmox VE platform, Proxmox Backup Server, and Proxmox Mail Gateway.
Proxmox

I run Proxmox CE on Debian. The combination is very stable. Proxmox uses KVM qemu for VM guests and LXC for container guests. I don't use LXC much.

OpenObserve

OpenObserve: Open Source Observability Platform | Logs, Metrics & Traces
Fast, scalable and cost-effective open source observability platform. Monitor logs, metrics & traces with 140x lower storage costs than Elasticsearch. Start in 2 minutes.
OpenObserve
140x the compression of Elastic, 140x less the price of Splunk. SQL support. API support.

OpenObserve is a full Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces (MELT) stack. It has great Docker support, an API and it works very well with Vector or OpenTelemetry

Apache Guacamole

Apache Guacamole®
Kali Linux in a browser via the Apache Guacamole RDP web gateway (Xrdp)

Apache Guacamole is a remote-work gateway with many features, including optimized RDP rendering. Xrdp is a code reading friendly RDP server (with options for glyphs and optimized font rendering). The combination works well for Linux.

Example: Kali Linux (KDE) with Burp Suite for a web app pentest.

Development

💶
I dislike the trend of treating developers as consumers. Serverless, proprietary developer SaaS products, they are all the same. I promote self-sustained, end-to-end owned workflows.

Gitea

Gitea Official Website
Gitea - Git with a cup of tea! Painless self-hosted all-in-one software development service, including Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry and CI/CD

Gitea also has Gitea Actions as a pendant to GitHub Actions. I use Dagger to get the best value out of both worlds. GitHub-hosted runners for builders (Windows and macOS especially) are super cheap.

OpenGist

Opengist
Documention for Opengist
OpenGist is for your snippets / gists. It doesn't always have to be a Git repository.

I use OpenGist for some config files. Not with secrets.

Knowledge bases

📖
I tested out many knowledge base systems for the AI era.

SiYuan

SiYuan - Privacy-first personal knowledge management system that supports Markdown, block-level ref, and bidirectional links
SiYuan - Privacy-first personal knowledge management system that supports Markdown, block-level ref, and bidirectional links
SiYuan
SiYuan is a powerful Wiki. It can be hosted in Docker, and serve a read-only and editor endpoint separately. There is an API, tag support. graph, Markdown, global search, hierarchical notes... all you know from Obsidian Notes. Ready for the WWW

I am working on an LLM Wiki as a global agentic knowledge / memory layer, using the SiYuan API. It can be browsed by humans and agents alike. Then my old Confluence content can be imported automatically.

RAGflow

RAGFlow
Build a superior context layer for AI agents - Empower your AI agents through the leading open-source RAG engine, delivering reliable context and an integrated agent platform, built for enterprise.
RAGflow uses local models to read complex PDFs like market reports with tables or research reports with charts. The actual GPU-heavy embedding process can be supported with providers. You do not need a GPU.

I use RAGflow with my custom MCP server. The workflow is simple: upload PDF, XLSX, DOCX etc. Wait a little. Search the knowledge base (with AI). The display within the Web UI is great for finding literature references.

The hosting itself can be managed with a Docker container inside a Linux VM.

Ghost self-hosted

Hosting Ghost - Ghost Developer Docs
A short guide to running Ghost in a production environment and setting up an independent publication to serve traffic at scale.
Ghost Developer Docs

I self-host Ghost blogs instead of WordPress or Drupal. It's faster and simpler. I use Docker Compose for this blog here. Nothing fancy.