Clever Architecture Enables Affordable Personal AI Agent

Developer Georg Larsson has built a personal AI assistant that runs on just $7 per month using an innovative architecture. The system uses two agents hosted on separate virtual private servers (VPS) and leverages IRC as its transport layer for the public-facing component.

Technical Details:

• Public agent (Nullclaw): A 678 KB Zig binary requiring only ~1 MB of RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server
• Private agent (Ironclaw): Handles email and scheduling, accessible via Tailscale using Google’s A2A protocol
• Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second response), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use when needed
• Cost cap: Hard limit of $2 per day across both agents
• Unified billing: Uses a single API key and billing relationship thanks to A2A passthrough

The setup allows Larsson to maintain a personal AI assistant with enterprise-grade capabilities at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

You can try Nullclaw by visiting https://georgelarson.me/chat/ or connecting via IRC to irc.georgelarson.me:6697 (TLS), channel #lobby.