u/mcharytoniuk

So, I made a project to self-host AI in your own infrastructure (yes, I asked mods if I can post this).

Ok, "own infrastructure" can mean either literally a server rack in your living room (my case), or something rented in a data centre (because let's face it not everyone can afford an entire server).

I do believe that:

1. If you are setting up a system (a product, anything) on third party vendor models you pretty much, in essence need to follow their exact narrative or guidelines, because they can actually censor your applications in the way they see fit.
2. Costs are actually unsustainable for them, and sooner or later they would need to either tremendously raise prices, and cut off access to their models.
3. We are wasting huge amounts of energy and resources to run huge models like Opus, Fable, Sol, while self-hosting (even repurposing the hardware you have) might be enough.
4. I do see AI as a great empowerment tool. I have been working in IT for 20+ years, and all I've seen is that most of the IT teams actually do their best to make and "indispensable" bottleneck in any organization you start to form such team. I think its just plain unfair that a small group of people claim to have a monopoly to build, and release stuff; I do not want to do that, and I am extremely happy to see people with zero programming experience to try and contribute to the project. Sure, I won't merge code that would be bad, or do harm, but I will try to educate instead if you are trying to contribute (might take me some time to react though), so no worries there.

So, I guess, we can wait for a systemic change, or we can just do whatever we can, and switch to self-hosting models, and taking ownership of them. If you work in a business you can also try and dissuade them from using vendor models, and instead build something reliable, use it in a way you see fit (without censorship), and with all the reliability you can provide.

Claude Code with Opus 4.8 tends to fan out many agents (which I guess are Sonnet/Haiku agents). I added this global rule, and I think it helps the quality of the produced code a lot:

ALWAYS, after dispatching agents (subagents, workflows, or any delegated work), do NOT blindly trust their outputs. Treat everything they return as a suggestion, never as established fact.

- Re-review and re-validate every claim, finding, and change yourself with your maximum effort before acting on it or reporting it as done.
- Read the actual code, run the actual checks, inspect the actual state — do not accept an agent's summary as proof that something works or is correct.
- An agent saying "I verified X" is not verification. Verify X yourself.
- If an agent reports findings (bugs, results, conclusions), independently confirm each one. Discard or correct anything that doesn't hold up under your own scrutiny.
- The agent's work accelerates yours; it does not replace your judgment or your responsibility for the final result.

Sure, it burns more tokens than it would otherwise (because it double checks itself), but at least weaker models are not limiting Opus 4.8 with their outputs, and the quality of outputs is A LOT better (because it double checks itself).