Animated diagram: a chatbot growing into a self-hosted AI infrastructure stack

From Chatbot to Self-Hosted AI Infrastructure

From Chatbot to Self-Hosted AI Infrastructure My AI setup started as a model choice: GPT or Claude, local or hosted, bigger context window, cheaper tokens. That still matters, but it is not enough once an assistant can read notes, call tools, remember preferences, and interact with infrastructure. This post covers the shape of the setup. The deeper details belong in the follow-up posts. The setup in layers At home I run Hermes as the agent layer on my main Linux machine. It talks to model providers, but it also has access to local tools, memory, scheduled jobs, and messaging. Around that sits a Docker-based infrastructure stack for knowledge retrieval, memory, search, monitoring, secrets, reverse proxying, and voice experiments with Whisper, Piper, XTTS, and Ollama. ...

June 10, 2026 · 4 min · Bas Rutjes