← Nelo / project: HQ

Project

HQ: a small company of AI colleagues

Ten specialized AI agents, each responsible for one slice of my homelab, coordinating through a shared ticket board instead of one long chat log.

The problem

My homelab runs a dozen self-hosted services: files, media, network filtering, a ticketing site, several websites. All of that needs constant, careful attention: monitoring, updates, backups, incident response. I'm one person, with school and an apprenticeship on top, so I can't watch it around the clock, and paying for managed IT support wasn't an option.

What I built

HQ: a small "company" of specialized AI colleagues (built on Claude), each responsible for one slice of the infrastructure, network, storage, security, websites, automation, and so on, the same way a real ops team would split the work. They coordinate through a shared ticket board, so problems get picked up, worked and closed instead of getting lost in one long chat log.

The part I'm most proud of is the guardrails, not the AI itself: a gatekeeper program is the only way any colleague can reach the actual servers, it checks who is allowed to do what, and it takes an automatic backup before anything risky. Planned changes only happen in a quiet overnight window unless something is actually broken, and anything big enough to matter needs my explicit yes or no from my phone before it happens.

Tech

HQ Boy, the handheld-console-styled status app for HQ, showing its login screen and a note that it runs a company with 10 employees
HQ Boy, the companion app I built so I can check on the company from my phone. Login is a one-time code sent over Telegram, so this is genuinely the first thing you see.
"Getting an AI to do IT work was the easy part. The real design problem was deciding what it's never allowed to do on its own, like touching backups or restarting something with people using it, and what always needs my sign-off first. A system like this is only as trustworthy as its rules, not its intelligence."

Want the deeper version?

The apprenticeship portfolio has the full technical write-up, and meet the team introduces each of the ten colleagues.