March 26, 2026
IRC is back, so is the drama
Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
Retro chatroom AI sparks budget wars and “clickbait” cries
TLDR: A developer built a cheap AI concierge that chats over old-school IRC and checks his code for real answers. Commenters split between applauding a slick, fast demo and calling it “just Claude with flair,” while others argue over model costs and dream up job-hunting bots—proof this idea has legs and sparks.
An indie dev put an AI concierge on a $7-a-month server and wired it into an old-school chatroom — yes, IRC, the 30-year-old chat protocol — to answer questions about his work by actually checking his code. You can try it at georgelarson.me/chat. But the real show is the comments.
One camp is cheering because it actually works. “Works very well,” beams one early tester, with others calling it fun and fast. Another camp isn’t buying the premise at all: the bot uses a commercial AI model, not a self-hosted brain, so why brag about servers and chat tech? Cue the “clickbait” alarms and cries of “it’s just Claude with a costume.”
Money talk turned spicy. The creator picked smaller, cheaper models for greetings and saved the bigger brain for heavy lifting, capped at $2 a day. Some praised the thriftiness; others fired back with spreadsheets: “there are cheaper models” on other platforms, so why pay premium rates? Meanwhile, one commenter went full startup pitch, dreaming of a spin-off that interviews candidates and applies to jobs for them.
Techies poked at the setup too—asking why this model for tools, how many connectors it uses, and whether the retro IRC choice is clever control or just nostalgia. Either way, the lobby is buzzing: old chat, new drama.
Key Points
- •The system uses two agents on separate machines: a lightweight public agent (nullclaw) and a private agent (ironclaw) with strict data boundaries.
- •IRC is the transport layer, with a web IRC client (gamja) and an Ergo server behind Cloudflare for proxy, TLS, and bot protection.
- •nullclaw is a 678 KB Zig binary (~1 MB RAM) that greets users, answers project questions, and can clone public GitHub repos.
- •Model strategy is tiered: Haiku 4.5 handles fast conversational tasks; Sonnet 4.6 is a fallback for tool use and deeper reasoning.
- •Costs are capped at $2/day to limit public-facing spend and abuse; initial security hardening includes non-root, key-only SSH access.