Self-hosting

My entire knowledge base had no undo, and adding one turned out to be a real distributed-systems puzzle because the same files live on four machines at once.

For an app that looks at your private photos, the machine learning cannot phone home, so every model in Loupe runs on your own machine, on a single consumer graphics card.

Culling a hundred-thousand-photo library should never come down to one mysterious score, so I split the decision into three plain roles that each answer a different question.

Turned the fleet dashboard into an installable phone app with alerts tiered by urgency, a critical channel that survives the app itself failing, and a dead-man's switch that can announce its own death.

My busiest compute machine was cooking itself under real load, so instead of just turning the work off, I built layers of protection that let it keep running without frying.

I taught my notes to answer questions by meaning, so I can ask what I decided about X and why and land on the right note even without remembering a single word from it.

I write a lot of scattered notes across a lot of projects, and instead of ever organizing them by hand, I built a pipeline that rebuilds and reorganizes the whole thing every night while I sleep.

A lot of the small jobs I was paying a hosted model to do did not need a frontier model at all, so I started running open-weight models on my own GPU box and let the routine work run for free.

I stopped doing my machines' work at the keyboard and built a way to hand a task to whichever machine should run it, let it run on its own, and pick up the result later.

I caused an outage by running a heavy job on the one machine that holds everything together, then spent the night proving my failover plan actually works.

Pulled fleet health and my entire notes vault onto one gated dashboard, then added semantic search over my own work by borrowing an embedding model already running elsewhere on the network.

Every cheap health check told me my storage link was perfectly healthy while it was actually running at a tenth of its speed, and the real work was proving which piece was lying.

Turned the fleet into a full mesh where every machine can reach every other one directly, passwordless, without hand-managed keys, laying the groundwork for running work anywhere in the fleet.

Moved the public tunnel entrance off the busy compute box onto its own dedicated Raspberry Pi with its own uplink, so a reboot of any other machine can no longer take the whole public site down.