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Notes on owning your agent runtime.
Engineering write-ups, deployment patterns, and the thinking behind source-available agent infrastructure.
Sovereign / Self-Hosted AI
Self-hosted AI: how to own your AI stack
Self-hosted AI means running the models, the data they touch, and the automation around them on infrastructure you control. What the stack is actually made of, the two honest ways to own one, and what owning it has to include before the phrase means anything.
AI agent builder: what to look for when the agents have to run inside your own environment
Most agent builders do the building part well. The question that decides the purchase is different: where does the agent run, and who owns what it leaves behind? Four questions to ask, and the three ways these platforms are delivered.
What is an AI agent? A plain definition, and the three things that make one safe to run
An AI agent is software that takes a goal, works out the steps itself, and uses tools to carry them out. What an agent is made of, where agents go wrong, and the three things that make one safe to run.
Before you self-host an AI agent platform: the questions to ask any vendor
Seven questions to put to any AI-agent vendor before you self-host. They are deliberately vendor-neutral: each one is a property you can check, not a promise you have to accept. Where a vendor cannot give you a straight answer, the silence is the answer.
Source-available vs open source: what the difference means when you're buying AI for a regulated environment
EpicStaff is not open source. It is source-available under the PolyForm Perimeter 1.0.0 licence — you can read every line, run it, and modify it for your own use. The main restriction is on building a competing product, and it was never pointed at you.
Who audits the harness?
An agent harness is the runtime layer your agents execute inside: it decides what they can call, what they can see, and what gets written down. Many harnesses are cloud control planes, which means the layer enforcing your governance is a layer you cannot inspect. If you work somewhere that gets audited, that is the question worth asking first.
What is sovereign AI?
Sovereign AI isn't \"hosted in an EU region\" — it's control in the literal sense. The four layers you control, why it just became binding EU procurement policy, and a procurement checklist.