60 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
60 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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title: "lobotomy labs: when your homelab needs an org"
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---
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the kettle's been whistling for a while, but i've been too busy wiring things together to pour. let's catch up.
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## from personal projects to an organization
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somewhere between building gophergate, shipping dumpsterchat, and wiring up coop credits, a pattern emerged: i wasn't just tinkering anymore. i was running infrastructure. real services, real users (even if those users are ~12 degenerates in a chat server named smoothbraincollective).
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so i did what any reasonable person with a homelab addiction would do: i made it official. meet **[lobotomy labs](https://git.dustin.coffee/LobotomyLabs)** — the org that now owns the chaos.
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why "lobotomy labs"? because we do unspeakable things to infrastructure so you don't have to. also because naming things is hard and this one stuck.
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## what lives under the org
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right now, two main projects anchor the org:
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### gophergate
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the custom llm proxy gateway that routes traffic across xai, google, openai, deepseek, and moonshot. it tracks spend, handles failover routing, and gives me a single endpoint for every ai-powered tool in the stack. it's the reason i can run hermes agent, grok-bot, and a dozen other llm consumers without surprise bills.
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gophergate started as a "this existing proxy is inaccurate" frustration project and turned into the spine of the whole ai stack. written in go, runs like a freight train.
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### dumpsterchat
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the self-hosted discord-like platform that's been my biggest build this year. go/chi backend, vite/react/tailwind frontend, websocket real-time messaging. threads, forums, calendar channels, docs, moderation tools, role-based permissions with bitflags. all running on a proxmox lxc container that costs me roughly nothing per month.
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the full breakdown is in its own post, but the short version: building your own chat platform is simultaneously the dumbest and most rewarding thing you can do with a weekend. or twelve weekends. who's counting.
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## why an org matters
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it's a small thing, but it changes how you think about projects. when dumpsterchat lived under my personal gitea account, it was "dustin's side project." under lobotomy labs, it's a thing with a name and a home that isn't just my brain.
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it also sets up the future: if friends want to contribute, they have a place. if i spin up new services (and i will, because i apparently can't stop), they have a home that isn't buried in a personal repo list.
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## the ai stack update
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since the last post, the ai toolkit has evolved significantly:
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- **hermes agent** by nous research has replaced opencode/pi.dev as my primary coding assistant. it's got a persistent memory system (mnemosyne), a skills framework for reusable workflows, cron job support, and multi-agent delegation. it remembers what we worked on last session. it's like having a senior dev who never forgets context.
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- **gophergate** continues to be the routing layer for all of this. every ai call goes through it, gets logged, gets tracked.
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- **local models** are getting more viable. smaller instruction-tuned models running on the homelab handle quick tasks without hitting external apis.
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## what's brewing next
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- **lobotomy labs website** — probably a simple landing page that links to the projects and the git org.
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- **gophergate open source** — the codebase is close to presentable. a few more docs and it goes public.
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- **dumpsterchat phase 6** — voice channels are on the roadmap. because apparently text chat isn't enough chaos.
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- **more infrastructure surgery** — the homelab never stops growing, and neither does the list of things to automate.
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the org is small now, but it's a foundation. and in the homelab world, foundations are what you build everything else on top of.
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thanks for reading. if you're running your own lab and haven't organized your projects into something coherent yet, maybe consider it. it's a small move, but it clarifies a lot.
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what's brewing in your setup? drop a comment or reach out.
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-dustin
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