Software engineer at Sendoso. Founder of Kynine (kynine.dog) - AI-powered dog care platform. Building Ghost OS on the side. https://www.ghostwright.dev/
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Show HN: Rendi, an agent harness on Trigger.dev without spinning up a VM
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3 points·by mcheemaa··0 comments
Show HN: Phantom – Open-source AI agent on its own VM that rewrites its config
This is awesome to hear. The "I truly have no idea what the system or code looks like but it's been so much fun just letting it build" resonates hard. That's exactly the experience we had too.
The "For People Who Don't Write Code" angle has been the biggest surprise for us. We had a non-technical user ask for a Chrome extension and the agent built it, packaged it as a zip, and sent the download link. No terminal, no dev environment needed.
If you ever want to formalize your setup, we built Specter (https://github.com/ghostwright/specter) to provision VMs with DNS, TLS, and systemd in under 90 seconds. Makes spinning up new instances trivial. Would love to hear more about your Graphiti memory setup, that's a different approach than our Qdrant-based system.
OpenClaw runs on your machine or an ephemeral sandbox. Each session starts fresh. Phantom gets its own dedicated VM that persists. The ClickHouse instance it built three weeks ago is still running and queryable.
OpenClaw spends a lot of tokens on screen understanding and vision loops. About 60% of its skills are basic macOS-level computer use (clicking, typing, reading the screen). Phantom skips that entirely and uses the Claude Agent SDK directly, so it gets full shell, file system, git, web search, and MCP tools natively without the token overhead of parsing screenshots.
The biggest difference is probably dynamic MCP. Phantom registers its own MCP tools at runtime, and they persist across restarts. It built a ClickHouse REST API, registered it as a tool, and now any Claude Code session or other agent that connects to it can query that data. It builds its own capabilities and exposes them as an API.
It also has persistent vector memory across sessions (Qdrant, local), a self-evolution engine where a different model validates every config change, and we built a companion tool called Specter (https://github.com/ghostwright/specter) that provisions VMs with DNS, TLS, and systemd in under 90 seconds, so deploying a new Phantom is genuinely three commands.
Both are good projects, different approaches. OpenClaw does computer use well. Phantom is a persistent co-worker that lives on its own machine and compounds over time.