the kettle’s been whistling for a while, but i’ve been too busy wiring things together to pour. let’s catch up.

from personal projects to an organization

somewhere between building gophergate, shipping dumpsterchat, and wiring up coop credits, a pattern emerged: i wasn’t just tinkering anymore. i was running infrastructure. real services, real users (even if those users are ~12 degenerates in a chat server named smoothbraincollective).

so i did what any reasonable person with a homelab addiction would do: i made it official. meet lobotomy labs — the org that now owns the chaos.

why “lobotomy labs”? because we do unspeakable things to infrastructure so you don’t have to. also because naming things is hard and this one stuck.

what lives under the org

right now, two main projects anchor the org:

gophergate

the custom llm proxy gateway that routes traffic across xai, google, openai, deepseek, and moonshot. it tracks spend, handles failover routing, and gives me a single endpoint for every ai-powered tool in the stack. it’s the reason i can run hermes agent, grok-bot, and a dozen other llm consumers without surprise bills.

gophergate started as a “this existing proxy is inaccurate” frustration project and turned into the spine of the whole ai stack. written in go, runs like a freight train.

dumpsterchat

the self-hosted discord-like platform that’s been my biggest build this year. go/chi backend, vite/react/tailwind frontend, websocket real-time messaging. threads, forums, calendar channels, docs, moderation tools, role-based permissions with bitflags. all running on a proxmox lxc container that costs me roughly nothing per month.

the full breakdown is in its own post, but the short version: building your own chat platform is simultaneously the dumbest and most rewarding thing you can do with a weekend. or twelve weekends. who’s counting.

why an org matters

it’s a small thing, but it changes how you think about projects. when dumpsterchat lived under my personal gitea account, it was “dustin’s side project.” under lobotomy labs, it’s a thing with a name and a home that isn’t just my brain.

it also sets up the future: if friends want to contribute, they have a place. if i spin up new services (and i will, because i apparently can’t stop), they have a home that isn’t buried in a personal repo list.

the ai stack update

since the last post, the ai toolkit has evolved significantly:

• hermes agent by nous research has replaced opencode/pi.dev as my primary coding assistant. it’s got a persistent memory system (mnemosyne), a skills framework for reusable workflows, cron job support, and multi-agent delegation. it remembers what we worked on last session. it’s like having a senior dev who never forgets context.
• gophergate continues to be the routing layer for all of this. every ai call goes through it, gets logged, gets tracked.
• local models are getting more viable. smaller instruction-tuned models running on the homelab handle quick tasks without hitting external apis.

what’s brewing next

• lobotomy labs website — probably a simple landing page that links to the projects and the git org.
• gophergate open source — the codebase is close to presentable. a few more docs and it goes public.
• dumpsterchat phase 6 — voice channels are on the roadmap. because apparently text chat isn’t enough chaos.
• more infrastructure surgery — the homelab never stops growing, and neither does the list of things to automate.

the org is small now, but it’s a foundation. and in the homelab world, foundations are what you build everything else on top of.

thanks for reading. if you’re running your own lab and haven’t organized your projects into something coherent yet, maybe consider it. it’s a small move, but it clarifies a lot.

what’s brewing in your setup? drop a comment or reach out.

-dustin