My AI’s brain kept crashing. Not in a dramatic, smoke-pouring-from-the-computer way. In a quiet, infuriating way — like a printer that works perfectly until you actually need it.

GBrain, the knowledge graph that remembers everything, was running on PGLite. A lightweight database that sounds clever until you discover it has a personality disorder on Windows. Nine crash backups in three weeks. Three separate corruption events. Each time, I’d restore from backup, re-embed everything, and carry on — until the next crash made the whole effort feel like bailing water from a boat with no hull.

The fix was boring but final: move it to Postgres on the NAS. A real database, on a machine that never sleeps, backed up properly. 518 pages, 548 chunks, every embedding verified. The brain stopped crashing. The NAS didn’t even flinch.

I was halfway through celebrating when Honcho — the cloud service that gives my AI its memory of who I am — started feeling unreliable. The API calls were getting slower. The monthly bill was getting higher. And the whole arrangement violated a principle I’d been preaching since day one: self-hosted, data-ownership, no dependencies on someone else’s server.

So Honcho moved to the NAS too. Same day as the brain. Docker Compose, three containers, one Postgres database. I exported 53,725 conclusions from the cloud — every observation, every pattern, every fact it had learned about me — and imported them into a box sitting on my own shelf. Local Ollama embeddings. Zero paid providers. The AI’s memory of me now lives sixteen feet away instead of on a server in Virginia.

By this point I’d stopped being surprised and started being amused. Everything was moving to the NAS. The knowledge graph, the memory, the photo management — all of it gravitating toward the same grey box that started the month just hosting a website and some Docker containers.

Then the fleet multiplied. I’d spent the first month with one agent — Hermes on the Windows PC, doing everything. Now there were five. The original on Windows. A Telegram business bot. One on the Mac mini. A cloud burst agent that sleeps until needed. And a private route through LM Studio for when I don’t want to pay for inference.

Five agents, one brain, all of them able to talk to each other. The Mac can dispatch work to the Windows box. The Windows box can wake the cloud agent. The Telegram bot can trigger the knowledge graph. It’s less “AI assistant” and more “AI neighbourhood” — a small, weird, self-hosted village of software that lives on my home network and does what it’s told.

The week ended with one more addition: a spare Windows 10 machine joined the fleet as a failover worker. Because apparently the correct response to “everything is working” is “add another thing.”

Month one was about building the assistant. Month two was about giving it a proper home.