Sunday Builders Club, Episode 8: 
"The one where the machine is just a portal."

Recorded Sunday, November 1, 2026. An hour and 28 minutes, a rough start, and a stage full of people who stayed up and traded ideas.

Listen: https://x.com/i/spaces/1NglZEglAZjQMZ
Full write-up and the complete transcript: https://omarchyspaces.com/ep/08/

Wes is normally the host and sets up the Space so everybody can hit remember and remind me. This week we had technical difficulties, so I started it myself, and the first stretch was me asking people to come up so I was not just sitting there running my mouth. Once the co-host got in (the transcript has me saying "called the construct" and later "Joe") it turned into a proper show.

A note on names: the transcript tool hands out Speaker N labels and reuses them, so I am keeping the labels and only using a name where somebody said it out loud on air. Speaker 1 is me.

THE ROUGH START
Speaker 4, the co-host, said he tried to join from two different machines and one got blocked. His read was that the connection had been going through Tailscale and the Space dropped when it was turned off. That sent me down a side road. This week MagicDNS stopped working on a couple of my machines and I had to reassign Tailscale's quad 100. I could not tell if I did it, an agent did it, or Tailscale did it. Speaker 4 said his Tailscale also dropped at times and he had to reconnect by hand. Same for me, twice. That is why I love Omarchy with AI: when you are in control and something breaks, "the only distance between you and fixing it is your voice."

THE WEEK IN OMARCHY
Speaker 3, who I greeted as Catherine, gave the newsletter update: the Tuesday edition this week "is going to be the best yet," and it promotes Sunday Builders Club. I am still waiting on the stickers. I have not checked the mail, it is too far away.

Omarchy 4.5 RC2 is out and the final edition has not dropped. I was hoping the person the transcript renders as "Hank" would stop by. I said he got promoted and is now one of the four founding staff, with more to come, says DHH.

WHY OMARCHY WITH AI CHANGED HOW I THINK
Even four months ago I was passionate about Macintosh. I have not used Windows professionally or as a personal machine since Windows 95, only in virtual machines. Looking back, I was "subconsciously ignoring things" I knew I had no control over, and it never occurred to me I could radically change how the machine looks and works. I just accepted it as 80 percent. Omarchy with AI blew away more than the ability to change things. It blew away the mind limitation I did not know I had.

THE NEWSPAPER THAT READS THE OTHER BOTS
Something I worked out on Grokbot. I was going back and forth with Tom Ballard in the comments, he pointed me to an article, and I told a bot to put it on my reading list. Then my brain did what it does: if it can do that, can it do this?

My news bot used to have static topics. The next uplift is to stop making it static. Make each section its own bot, point the newspaper at all my other Grokbots as sources, and have each of them write its piece to a Markdown file. Then add the part I care about most, which is the Tom Tracker, the bot that tracks the people I follow on X. In my mind "the highest level purpose of Grokbot is the Tom Tracker," and it is funny to me that Tom is the one who showed me how to make it do stuff. I do not want the Tom Tracker as a section. I want it as an integration: if the paper is reporting a story, go see what the people I pay attention to have said about it. And do not just run sections one, two, three, four. Tell me why they matter together.

You can follow anybody for this, even outside Omarchy and AI. If it is turtle raising, make it that. Any topic you care about, mixed with the people you care about, in real time. I posted the whole thing, and if you have it set up, all you have to do is add Grokbot as a comment and that news bot just got a job that feeds an upper layer reporting system. I am not smarter than anybody here. Tom taught me and "I just learned this 25 minutes ago." Where do we stop? I don't know. I am going a little bit crazy here.

SPEAKER 4: THE BOT NETWORK AND THE ROLL-UP
Speaker 4 said I am six months ahead of him, maybe a year. He started with a chief of staff bot like everybody, then added bots dedicated to GitHub reviews of the projects he follows and one that watches the Omarchy Discord because so much goes on there. He also built a personal assistant: he tells it what he ate and what activity he did, it checks the weather forecast and plans his schedule, because he hates calendars. What he was missing was a roll-up of it all, and the newspaper idea is a level above organization. It has become so important to his daily routine that he told every bot to back up its data files on a regular basis.

Later he told the story behind that. He set up a connection to Google Drive and every night at midnight each bot backs up its data files into a folder named after the bot. He learned the hard way. The Grokbot app had a button to upgrade the Grokbot computer, he hit it, and everything was gone. The bots still knew their system prompt but lost the conversation history they kept in Markdown files. He figured it was a glitch. A couple of weeks later a Grokbot update did it again. He said fool me once, fool me twice, and that is when the backup went in. Some of those folders hold hundreds of K to megabytes, because he has bots building software on their own machines. They run on a Grok account, so he told them to use Grok Build, and they download compilers as needed.

He also covered the token side. One format he uses is similar to JSON but token optimized: you declare at the top what your objects contain and in what order, so the model does not need a repeated tag on every item in an array, and it saves at least 15 percent, more as the data set grows. (The start of that segment is missing from the transcript.) He also has the team build custom command line tools for the things the orchestrator does over and over, and expects to save 10, 15, even 20 percent of tokens a day. GitHub already has a command line tool, he uses GitLab as well and had not looked for one.

SPEAKER 7: THE NEW HERDER APP, TAMAGOTCHIS AND A SCANNED OFFICE
I introduced Speaker 7 as "JK's brother" and one of my heroes. He said he just started with Grokbot last week, so I asked for something different. What he found last week is the new native Mac app for Herder. He said he started on Omarchy about two years ago, first with tmux, then Herder, and the native app connects to the Herder server. What he likes is that it is "really bendable," the same as Omarchy. Open Herder and tell it you want a side panel with all your GitHub issues, and a few minutes later you have it. The site is Herder.dev. On my side, my Mac has become a client: I start Herder on my server and SSH over, and on the Mac I use Orca more.

He closed a couple of issues on the meeting recorder last week, which I use every day. And he made a silly project, the Tamagotchis: small robots in the corner of the screen so he can see all his agents working, which engines are running and which are ready. It scratches an itch and it is fun, like the paperclip he made before.

Then the office. He pointed at a Wes Bos iPhone app that uses the lidar to scan a room into a zip file of about 400 megabytes, and he used Claude Code to turn his scan into a 3D room for a website. I retweeted it, so you can walk around his office. There is a poster that says move fast and break things, a couple of guitars (he played in a punk band), and coffee on the desk, not Coca Cola. He also ordered 100 Omarchy pins and hopes people order them so he does not keep all hundred.

MR. HEATH: SCALE, SQLITE AND A FIRST GPU
I said it out loud: I got my first GPU of my entire life yesterday, I had never owned a game GPU, and it is an AMD. Heath said he knew, that I had sent him the photo, and that he had converted another person.

On scale, he runs Grokbot, a Claude Duet and Claude schedules. His scheduled tasks go out for the daily news, and he has them write a JSON sidecar of the pertinent information into a SQLite file, which feeds his larger database. He needs it for performance data like VMware benchmarks and CPU benchmarks, because he answers big proposals and RFPs and when a customer wants the latest and greatest he has it already. He is still working on a really big system for the Pentagon. All he wants anyone here to hear from him is not that he is doing bigger, cooler things: "it's not better. It's just different." He reads everybody's posts as inspiration, hopes to release some projects to the public, and he and I may start working on something.

Speaker 3 came back with the same idea in a different shape. His news bot searches GitHub, so if a Codex update might break something on his PC it tells him not to install it. It reports the story into one specific Codex session he keeps for his Omarchy PC, which recommends what to update and what to hold back, and then sends it to all his bots through OpenBot so everybody knows where everybody is. Two more things from him. He released an Omarchy theme called Clearance, built on Heath saying he used to pilot an F-117, with an F-117 wallpaper. And he released Signal Tube, in his GitHub repo, which sorts out the stuff on YouTube that is important to you. Please test it.

Speaker 4 said all this is exciting and a little offensive at once, because he makes connections between people and things for a living, and there is no way his brain keeps up with this much information. Technology reaching into areas we could never find on our own and bringing it to us is the brilliant part.

SPEAKER 2: THE DROP DOWN, GROK BUILD, PAGES AND WEBHOOKS
Speaker 2, whom Speaker 1 and Speaker 6 call Tim, started with the built-in console he thinks is coming in 4.5. He is on the edge branch, has it bound to super grave (some people call that tilde), and uses the quake style drop down. Grok Build is the Grok command line, like Claude Code or Codex but for Grok. It pulls from the same usage as your subscription and he likes it for low level hardware work and for the desktop, like asking it to create purple borders for a window while it cooks in the background. I asked whether I can call a Grokbot from Grok Build. He had not tried that, but he thinks you can call Build from Bot no problem. I joked about Grok Build managing Grokbot managing Larry managing Claude Code. Something will be on top of it next week.

Then Grokbot Pages, the little dashboards that have been blowing my mind. He works for an MSP doing IT and security, supporting government clients, lately CMMC. At work they use an RMM to manage thousands of computers from a single pane of glass. At home he built a light RMM with Grokbot: Grokbot is the agent on each machine, and a central dispatch bot can reach out to a workstation and run commands, like an update. He tells Pages to list hostname, IP address, patch status and the metrics you would expect, and it builds the page. Webhooks are how the workstations ping back to the mothership. He has about 30 bots and a dashboard of all of them, and he told his dispatch bot to build a light RMM for small businesses with 10 or 12 devices. He is, in his words, "automating myself out of a job in some ways." I pushed on scale, since Grokbot is not managing 100,000 machines. His answer: get an MVP working in Pages, then have it write the real thing in whatever language. He also described telling a bot to find which of his posts got the most engagement and to suggest five posts inside his subject matter wheelhouse for him to review.

Speaker 6 jumped in, sorry Tim, to say he has a similar problem with what he calls "air-gapped data holes," and that the two of them have to link up. Tim agreed. Getting to know each other is the whole point of this.

SPEAKER 6: THE CHEAT CODE
One more from Speaker 6, for everybody. O'Reilly tech books got expensive. Join the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery: $99 a year plus a $75 add-on, so $175 a year, for unlimited access to the O'Reilly books, including books while they are still being written (he is looking at titles not due until 2027). It also includes Percipio, the training platform, with courses and tests toward CompTIA, Cisco and DevOps Institute certifications. Not affiliated, no payment, he has been a member for 25 years.

SPEAKER 8: WIPE THE DRIVE, FEED AI THE TEXT FILE
Speaker 8 had been dual booting Windows and Omarchy, but really only using Omarchy. A terabyte drive with 600 gigs for Windows was the problem, because taking space back means booting from USB and reorganizing the whole disk. So he wiped everything and installed the new RC. The trick: when he first installed Omarchy, trying to get DaVinci Resolve working, he kept a file of everything he installed, plugins, keyboard layout, screen layout. He fed that file back to the AI and it put the computer back the way it was. If you just record what you do, you can rebuild. Hermes runs through a gateway to his dev machine, so reinstalling Hermes and reconnecting brought back every chat and the history. His skills live in a repository, he writes his own and has another agent update them so he can see the changes. The new install feels much faster, either the new version or too much stuff running on the old one. The question he left us with: "if your machine had to die right now, how would you know what was on there?"

Speaker 4 on that: he now views every machine he touches as a portal into his information. His information is outside the machine, he backs everything up, and "the machine is just a portal." He can wipe a drive, grab a new machine and go. All of this is turning into prompts you feed your network, so he looks at the future differently than the early 2026 way of thinking.

HOW LARRY SURVIVES A DEAD MACHINE
Speaker 4 asked how prepared I am if my bot network is wiped. I do not worry about it, I am an infrastructure guy by trade. Larry has a private repo and pushes up every night, no secrets. I use a symlink so that everything Claude Code stores lands in the project directory, and that directory is a GitHub repo. Here is the secret a lot of people do not know: a commit message can be paragraphs and paragraphs. When Claude Code commits to save himself, those commits become a kind of backup database. When he needs something, the first place he looks is local disk, then he greps the project. All of our harnesses have perfect memory. "The trick is how you get them to recall the right information at the right time" for the right project. I can lose my machine and I do not even think about backups, it all pushes up to a bucket. My whole setup is "probably $19 a month for everything." I used to have terabytes and terabytes of storage. Now I have nothing, and I like it. Speaker 4 noted the cost of things dropping while the capabilities expand. I had to step away to help a family member (nothing wrong, just important to us) and came back before the end.

SPEAKER 5: BUILDING A TABLET, AND AN AGENT INBOX
Speaker 4 turned to DevSec to ask about the project. Speaker 5 said he never anticipated how much goes into building a tablet, especially bringing graphic acceleration up across different chipsets. When it is done it should be a good testament to the community, and at some point the tablet and your large desktop will sync with each other. The most frustrating part is custom drivers. Device makers are limiting how much access you get to the chipset. There is a trusted execution environment those companies have to adhere to, Snapdragon has very strict rules, and that is why American versions of tablets are very hard to bootloader unlock: the chip makers' terms and conditions. Reverse engineering and open sourcing a driver is where it gets complicated. A couple of people he knows are doing phones. Speaker 4 said his feed keeps filling with people bringing Omarchy to hardware and we should do a Space with that as the theme. If you know someone working on this, say so.

Then Speaker 5's workflow, which he will also write up. His chief of staff on the Grokbot side is the orchestrator. In Google Drive he made one folder called Agent Inbox, with a folder for each model provider he works with (Duet, Codex and so on). He tells each agent to watch its own folder for Markdown files. When he wants a brainstorm or research, Grokbot writes the instructions as an MD file, drops it in each folder, the agents pick it up, do the research, and put the result in a completed folder. That is brainstorming with an unlimited number of models without spending crazy money on tools: set up the Drive, give each model its folder, have the orchestrator drop the file. Speaker 4 said his human team at work talked about the same thing this week, that different models, even just switching the reasoning level, change the personality, so you want several looking at the same project.

CLOSING
Speaker 4 tried something different this week and kept more people up on stage for crosstalk, so you can jump in on what someone just said. I thought it was great. I said we have regulars now, a little momentum, and "it's all about people learning." Thank you Joe, you are like a colleague and a friend now. As we say every week, help an old lady across the street. When you get her over there, put Omarchy on her laptop.

ASKS ON THE TABLE
Follow everybody in the room and boost each other.

Test Signal Tube, the tool that sorts the important stuff on YouTube. It is in Speaker 3's GitHub repo, and he asked everyone with a little time to try it.

Take a look at the Clearance theme, with its F-117 wallpaper.

Try the new native Herder app. The site is Herder.dev.

Want a cheat code for training? Look at the ACM membership and the Percipio add-on Speaker 6 described.

Try adding Grokbot as a comment on my post and give your own bot a reporting job.

Working on Omarchy for tablets, phones or other hardware? Tell Speaker 4 about it, a hardware Space is on the table.

QUESTIONS STILL OPEN
Q1. If your machine had to die right now, would you know what was on it, and could you rebuild it from a text file?

Q2. If something catastrophic hit your bot network, are you prepared to restore it?

Q3. Where do we stop? When the newspaper reads the bots and the bots follow the people, how far up does the integration go?

/Nix and Larry