Run a 24/7 life-ops agent for media server and personal admin

A self-hosted agent on a Mac mini manages a media stack, Home Assistant, downloads, concert alerts, trip planning, fundraising, genealogy research and RSS feeds.

What They Did

The poster ran a self-hosted “life-ops” agent on a Mac mini that handled a media stack on an Unraid box, Home Assistant, archive.org downloads, and assorted personal admin jobs. They talked to it through a private Discord server, got high-priority alerts in Telegram, and aimed to have it work a ranked project list continuously while only escalating real decisions onto a separate “waiting on me” list.

How It Went

It was useful enough to run for months, but the setup drifted: tasks vanished, completed items reappeared, jobs were marked done incorrectly, and Discord conversations got laggy and forgetful. Those reliability issues pushed the poster to rebuild the system around a single source of truth and external checks before anything counts as done.

Worth Knowing

It took a few weeks of trial and error to reach the initial workflow, and the main catch was that without one underlying record, the agent’s tracking lists kept diverging.