Nixos on thelastguardian.me

Teaching an Agent to Click on Wayland

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Second half of giving the assistant hands: driving the actual screen.

In the last post I got an agent driving a browser - Selenium against a copy of my Firefox profile for anything on my own accounts, Playwright for the clean-room jobs. That didn’t cover native desktop apps with no DOM to drive, or the occasional site where only my actual running browser, with my actual session, would do.

Instead of controlling a browser, control the screen: move the real mouse, press real keys, against whatever window is in front of me. If the agent can operate the machine the way I do when I’m sitting at it, the browser and the native app stop being two different problems.

On GNOME on Wayland, that took a lot longer than I expected.

A Discord Control Plane for Autonomous Agents

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Another piece of the assistant: being able to answer it when I’m not at the desk.

The agent stack in my homelab runs AI coding sessions unattended. A scheduler pulls recurring tasks from Todoist, launches a session to handle each one, and a control-plane timer health-checks them every couple of minutes. Most of the time I never see any of it. But unattended work still needs a human sometimes: a permission prompt, an ambiguous call, a finding worth a second opinion.

I’m not sitting at the terminal when an agent hits one of those moments. So I built a session bridge: it relays an agent’s session to a Discord thread and relays my replies back. The agent asks, my phone buzzes, I answer from the bus, the agent carries on. One thread per session, so each conversation keeps its context.

The relay itself was easy. The hard part was the two failure modes I hit making it trustworthy.

HomeLab 2026 - The Two Datacenters

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Six years since the last post. The lab grew up - two sites on two continents, two Kubernetes clusters, GitOps everywhere, NixOS everywhere, and a GPU that talks back. A tour of what runs today and why.