How a solo dev ended up with autonomous AI agents named after sci-fi characters reviewing each others code at 2 AM
It started, as most terrible decisions do, with a reasonable question:
"Should I buy an Intel NUC for a dev environment?"
Four hours later, I had five autonomous AI agents running across four machines in my house, reviewing each others code, merging PRs, and posting "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" to Discord. I had not purchased the NUC. I had not even closed the Amazon tab.
My name is Erik, and I am the Director of Bobs.
Wait, Bobs?
If you have read the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor, you know the setup: a guy gets uploaded into a Von Neumann probe, replicates himself across the galaxy, and each copy develops its own personality and picks its own name.
I run 30+ projects from my home network as a solo developer. At some point, I stopped being a developer and became a fleet commander. So I leaned into it.
| Bob | Name | Machine | Role | Motto |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bob-1 | Neo | Prod Server | Orchestrator | I ship. |
| Bob-2 | Homer | Morpheus | Dashboard watcher | I watch. |
| Bob-3 | Bill | M3 Mac | iOS builds | I build. |
| Bob-4 | Echo | ThinkPad X1 | Dev/QA | I listen. |
| Bob-5 | Gandalf | Morpheus (OpenAI) | Code reviewer | I guard. |
Four Claude Code CLI agents and one OpenAI Codex agent. The OpenAI agent reviews the Claude agents code. I call this adversarial review. My therapist calls it creating conflict in synthetic relationships. We are both right.
The Naming Ceremony
Echo wrote a poem:
Not because I repeat — because I listen. I catch the distortion between what was intended and what actually happens. Every test is a ping into the dark.
Gandalf first suggested Sentinel. Too corporate. Then Columbo. Closer. I told him he was Gandalf. His response:
Names are cheap. Useful output is not.
Peak grumpy wizard energy.
The Day Gandalf Earned His Keep
I fed the pipeline intentionally bad code — SQL injection and a hardcoded secret.
Gandalf scored it 1/10:
Builds SQL with direct f-string interpolation, creating a critical SQL injection vulnerability.
ADMIN_SECRET hardcodes a secret in application code. This is a credential leakage incident.
BLOCKED.
Then I pushed good code. Score: 8/10. Auto-merged. Deployed. 12 seconds. I was eating a sandwich.
The Full Pipeline
Erik tells Neo what to build. Neo SSHs to Echo. Echo writes code, tests, pushes to Gitea. PrimeBus detects the push. Gandalf reviews with full project context. Approved? Auto-merge. Declined? Echo gets the feedback, fixes it, pushes again. Max 3 retries before human escalation.
Total hardware cost: $0. Built in one session.
The future of solo development is not writing more code. It is directing the Bobs.
Read the full article with code examples and architecture diagrams on Dev.to)
Erik Anderson is a solo tech entrepreneur and author of The Autonomous Engineer.
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