Homelab

cortexmd is an open-source long-term memory and code-navigation brain for AI agents, exposed over the Model Context Protocol. It gives an agent a persistent memory that survives across sessions and a way to navigate a codebase by querying an index instead of reading whole files into context. Self-hosted, MIT licensed, pre-alpha.

Two true stories from the life of an unpaid, self-appointed home sysadmin: the day my firewall’s intrusion prevention system banned my own security cameras, and the day my automation server politely declined every IP address in the house until there were none left.

The private version was a genuinely good tool that only worked for me: it was wired to my own setup, reading my personal synced Obsidian vault, in a way nobody else could pick up and run. Generalising it is what produced cortexmd’s brain-vault model: the tool owns its own brain and is its sole writer, and any user attaches their own vault read-only, untouched.

How cortexmd gives an AI agent a memory that behaves like one: eight kinds of memory, a hot/warm/cold lifecycle that promotes what you touch and lets the rest cool, hybrid recall that fuses keyword and meaning, a session-start wakeup, and a scheduled dream that quietly tidies the brain while nobody is looking.

A capable coding agent forgets everything when a session ends and re-reads the same files every time, burning tokens. This is the story of how a private homelab MCP server grew two answers to those problems and became cortexmd, the first post in a four-part series.

My Neato Botvac D6 turned into a brick the day the cloud was switched off: no app, no scheduling, barely a vacuum. OpenNeato, an ESP32 wired to the robot’s debug port, brings it back with a local web UI and no cloud at all. It was missing the one thing I cared about, a Home Assistant integration, so I built one and published it through HACS. This is the story and the integration details.

Turning a 1.91 inch AMOLED dev board into a multi-page bathroom display for weather, power, and (yes) my toothbrush. Driven by ESPHome, a mmWave presence sensor that also runs the lights, and a handful of I2C sensors.

A complete breakdown of every service running in my homelab, organized by category. Over 40 services covering productivity, media, home automation, AI, monitoring, and more.

How I use Komodo as a self-hosted GitOps control plane to orchestrate 30+ Docker stacks across a Proxmox cluster, with automatic deployments from a self-hosted Gitea instance, network segmentation via OPNsense, and a NAS that doubles as an AI compute node.