Inside my Dark Factory hardware stack: 48 Agent Pods on 2019 Mini-PCs
Inside my dark factory hardware fleet: 6 mini-PCs, 48 pod slots, why a 2.6x faster Zen 4 CPU only runs CI 1.17x faster, and why AWS costs $20k-$33k/year.
~/Code/jduncan-blog
Engineering, craft, and curiosity.
Self-taught engineer, recovering history major. Tech, woodworking, home automation.
Inside my dark factory hardware fleet: 6 mini-PCs, 48 pod slots, why a 2.6x faster Zen 4 CPU only runs CI 1.17x faster, and why AWS costs $20k-$33k/year.
Why I deleted 6,000 lines of LLM friction-counting in Leaf and replaced them with SQL flags, an Analyst agent, and a daily Dream pass.
Post-mortem fixes bloated my dark factory's agent prompts to 17,072 words in 30 days. See what happened when I cut 65% of the rules and moved them to code.
How I built an autonomous security loop in Leaf with Trivy, Semgrep, and an examiner agent, and what its first 289 findings fixed in BrandCast.
After 15.8 billion tokens and 208,649 model turns in Leaf, SWE-bench and static price routers like LiteLLM optimize for the wrong thing. Buy runs, not models.