DEV Community

Sina Meraji
Sina Meraji

Posted on

i built an open source coding agent harness that runs on hardware you control

#ai #opensource #selfhosted #devtools

i'm starting a new company in singapore called directionally local. the idea is simple: people who are serious about software should still own the hardware their agents run on.

the core of it is autopilot, an open source (MIT) coding agent harness. you use it in your terminal the way you'd use claude code or codex cli, but you pick the model. openrouter, deepseek, openai, anthropic, gemini, ollama, lm studio, 25+ providers, or any openai compatible endpoint. you bring your own key. (if you used kimiflare before, that was autopilot's old name.)

setup 

npm install -g directionallylocal
dl
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

dl asks 1 question: run agents on this computer (mac or linux), or on your own server over ssh (ubuntu 24.04/22.04 or debian 12). it installs everything, you pick a provider and model, and it opens an agent session.

how i use it

  • dl inside any github repo opens a session. close the terminal and it keeps running, dl reattaches.
  • dl run "fix the flaky checkout test" runs the task in its own sandbox and comes back as a PR. if the agents are on your server you can close the laptop.

the part i care about most: keys

subagents and background tasks run in hotcell sandboxes (docker, firecracker or apple virtualization microVMs). your real api key never goes inside them. each sandbox gets a short lived, spend capped, revocable token, and a gateway swaps the real key in on the way out. egress is default deny, and microVM guests don't even have a network card, they talk to the gateway over vsock.

1 caveat: the gateway only swaps credentials for HTTP APIs. it can't protect something like a postgres password.

limits right now

  • 1 person per server. team accounts are early access.
  • agents on the same machine need mac or linux. windows works if the agents run on your server.
  • serverless objects (the durable state part, for previewing workers apps) is pre-alpha.

i've been dogfooding it with deepseek v4.1 flash a lot and it's actually pretty good. the first proper user test of the new package broke everything lol, so if you try it and something breaks, tell me.

repo: https://github.com/directionally-local/autopilot
docs: https://directionallylocal.com/docs/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=launch-nov26

Top comments (0)