Yesterday I gave an AI coding agent a single task: deploy yourself to my VPS.
It ran for 6+ hours straight with zero timeouts (everything streamed via SSE), and I watched the whole thing unfold in SQLite logs. It ssh’d in, installed dependencies, configured nginx + SSL, set up systemd services, handled DNS resolution issues, fixed permission problems, and eventually got the entire stack running in production.
The interesting part wasn’t that it succeeded - it was watching it work through problems autonomously. When nginx config failed, it read error logs, tried different approaches, and eventually figured it out. Same with systemd service permissions and dependency conflicts.
I built this as a control plane for long-running AI agent tasks (using OpenCode/Claude) because API timeout limits kept killing complex operations. Uses Rust/Axum backend, systemd-nspawn for container isolation, and git-backed configs for skills/tools/rules.
Has anyone else experimented with truly long-running autonomous agents? Most platforms seem to hit timeout walls around 2-5 minutes. Curious what approaches others are taking.
GitHub: https://github.com/Th0rgal/openagent
💬 Discussion r/artificial (2 points, 3 commentaires)