Most personal-AI demos break the moment the demo ends.
I wanted infrastructure that survives normal life — my absence, model upgrades, repo refactors — and still ships code I'd sign off on. Not a colleague. Plumbing.
← Back to portfolio 01 · Infrastructure · building
The Conductor
A small Mac mini in Moss runs an orchestration gateway, supervised Claude agents that open pull requests in my own repositories, and self-hosted GitHub Actions runners that build and deploy the sites. A time-synced markdown knowledge base keeps the agents grounded in current project state.
What it is
The Conductor is the personal infrastructure — the agentic shipping factory — that builds and operates Håkansson Labs. It is not a "colleague" or a chatbot; it is a set of cooperating services running on a single Mac mini, designed so I can describe work — "ship this redesign", "fix this regression", "open a PR that does X" — and supervised agents do the mechanical parts. Routine changes merge themselves once CI is green; anything I want to see first gets a hold label.
Everything below is what is actually running today. Numbers, model versions, and skill counts intentionally are not listed: they change, and the value of the system is the architecture, not the inventory.
Four rules. Gated, not blind.
CI has to pass before anything merges, and a hold label stops what I want to review first. Repo-bounded permissions per invocation. Audit trail by default. Orchestration runs on local hardware — models are called as APIs, everything else stays on the Mac mini.
Four cooperating services on one Mac mini.
A gateway routes a task description to a supervised agent. The agent works in a scoped repo and opens a draft pull request. Self-hosted Actions build and deploy on merge. A markdown brain keeps every agent grounded in current project state.
Quiet by design.
What runs when nothing surprising is happening. It gets out of the way when something is. The interesting parts are the projects it ships — not the orchestration itself.
Why it exists
The point is not novelty — agent frameworks are everywhere — but reliability. Most personal-AI demos break the moment the demo ends. The Conductor's design goal is to survive normal life: my own absence, model upgrades, repo refactors. It is what runs when nothing surprising is happening, and it gets out of the way when something is.
How autonomy is bounded
Deploys are gated, not blind. Routine changes ride a CI-gated auto-merge — the build has to pass, and a hold label stops anything I want to review first — and the Opportunity Pipeline only publishes a build when it clears a strict functional gate, staying silent otherwise. What is deliberately absent: an "always-on" agent persona, and any cross-repo agent that can rewrite shared state unattended. The Conductor is plumbing. The interesting parts are the projects it ships — Politipuls, Morgenbrief, this site, and the rest of Håkansson Labs.