durable-homelab

A zero-build web surface for a personal agent built on pi-durable — Earendil's experimental durable agent harness.

Status: experimental. Built in a day on a substrate that shipped the day before. The pi-durable API is still settling — this repo pins ^1.0.0 and will track it.

What it is

One process, two jobs:

1. A durable agent — sessions, transcripts, tools (read/edit/bash via pi-durable's CodingTools), subagents, kn-backed memory search, a continuity log. Everything is a durable task: it survives crashes, counts its own cost, and can be steered mid-run.
2. A web surface for it — server-rendered HTML fragments over SSE, wired with htmx. No bundler, no client framework, no build step. Sessions sidebar, live streaming, mid-run steering, late join.

chord (state + transport machinery)
  ↑
pi-durable (agent semantics: sessions, tasks, compaction)
  ↑
this repo (agent config + web surface)      ← you are here

Why it looks like this

• Zero build: plain TypeScript run by node 24 type stripping, one vendored JS file (htmx). The tool stays inspectable — and the agent itself can maintain its own UI.
• Server-rendered fragments: all durable state lives server-side; the browser is a renderer. The hardest problem of agent web UIs (client state sync) disappears by construction.
• Durable-native sessions: conversations are first-class (create, switch, fork-able), subagents are just conversations, everything survives kill -9.

Quickstart

Requirements: Node >= 24, and a provider credential in pi's auth store (this defaults to the z.ai coding plan; any pi provider works with a small config change).

git clone https://github.com/e4779/durable-homelab.git
cd durable-homelab
npm install
node src/serve.ts
# → http://127.0.0.1:8642

Credentials are read read-only from ~/.pi/agent/auth.json (pi's own store; bridge logic in src/credentials.ts). Set PI_AGENT_DIR to point elsewhere, PORT for the port, KN_DIR for the knowledge base the memory tool searches.

Run as a service

A systemd user unit template lives in deploy/ — adjust paths, then:

cp deploy/durable-homelab.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now durable-homelab

Layout

• src/runtime.ts — harness assembly; the DurableView / DurableController seam that surfaces plug into
• src/web.ts — SSE + htmx surface (fragment renderers + routes)
• src/extensions/ — memory (kn search), continuity (persistent notes), subagent
• src/model-runtime.ts — pi-ai builtinModels over pi's auth store
• docs/M0.md — what porting off the monorepo actually required
• goal.md — the milestone ledger; continuity.md — the agent's own handoff log

Built in the open

This project is developed agent-first: an agent (running on this very stack) wrote most of the code, and its working memory lives in the repo — see goal.md and continuity.md. Humans review, steer, and use the thing.

Credits: Earendil for pi, pi-durable and chord; jmfederico's pi-web for inspiration; monotykamary's pi-fabric ecosystem for the maps.

License

MIT