The Homelab
AIMAS — Autonomous Integrated Multi-Agent System.
AIMAS is a self-improving, local-first AI stack running on a Pop!_OS tower in my home. No cloud dependency for core operations. No vendor lock-in. 23 language models, 5 federated agents, and a growing ecosystem of Docker containers, cron jobs, and knowledge pipelines.
How This Started
It started the way most homelab projects do: one container too many, a directory structure that made sense at 2am, and a creeping suspicion that there had to be a better way.
Early 2026. Local AI was having a moment. Ollama made it dead simple to run language models on your own hardware. Open-source models were getting genuinely good. The idea of running your own uncensored, private AI — no subscriptions, no content policies, no "I can't help with that" — was suddenly not just possible but practical.
So I started pulling models. Then Open WebUI for a chat interface. Then n8n for automation. Then ChromaDB for RAG. Then a few more models. Then a few more containers. Before long I had 16 containers running from 4 different docker-compose files, 2 directories called variations of "mega", and a bootstrap script I was afraid to run because it might break something.
That's when we hit The Fiasco (2026-05-11). Not a disaster — more of a reckoning. A full audit found an API key in a markdown file, 5 containers in a restart loop, and 3 competing copies of the same files in different directories. The Fiasco was the best thing that happened to the project.
What AIMAS Is Now
AIMAS stands for Autonomous Integrated Multi-Agent System. It's a mouthful. What it means in practice:
Docker Stack
Ollama, Open WebUI, ChromaDB, PostgreSQL, n8n, LiteLLM, Syncthing, Headscale, Watchtower — 9 canonical services, one compose file.
Agent Ecosystem
5 federated agents — Hermes (orchestrator), Claude Code (deep reasoning), Cursor (IDE), Kimi (long context), Gemini (multimodal) — with shared memory and handoff protocols.
Knowledge Vault
4.8 GB of git-tracked markdown — every document, transcript, skill, and ontology. Obsidian-compatible. Harvests YouTube transcripts and auto-extracts skills.
Feral Daemon
An autonomous repair agent that runs at 5am daily — scans for broken files, stale skills, orphaned TODOs, and auto-patches what it can.
SUNO God Mode 4
A 10-module AI music prompt engineering system with 800+ keyword corpus, B.A.R.S. lyric framework, and genre taxonomy.
The NORTHSTAR Vision
AIMAS is building toward full autonomy: a tower that answers questions about itself, generates music/images/video/code autonomously, orchestrates 18+ specialized agents with consensus protocols, and continuously learns from everything fed into it.
The technical name is NORTHSTAR. The practical name is "the homelab that does everything I want." It's a long-term project — but the building is as interesting as the destination.
Post-Fiasco Principles
Z=10
Everything operational or it doesn't exist. No placeholders. No "coming soon."
One Compose
One canonical docker-compose.yml. No exceptions. No more 4 competing compose files.
Secrets in .env
No API keys in markdown files. Ever again. chmod 600, never committed.
Local-First
Your compute, your rules. Cloud is a fallback, not a dependency.