I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

Show HN: I tested 15 free AI models at building real software on a $25/year VPS

I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer is active in the show hn launch space.

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The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol.Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day.A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship regardless of who initiated the request.You can talk to nully at https://georgelarson.me/chat/ or connect with any I

As a business in show hn launch, I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer is listed here with the public details available about it.

It is recorded at the Show HN launch stage.

Website: georgelarson.me/writing/2026-04-03-25-dollar-ai-lab