Automation on the brain
A well known fact, any headline ending in a question mark can emphatically be answered, "No."
I want to spend fewer weekends documenting projects so I endeavored to get my ai agents truly integrated with my local gitea instance. I had gotten a claude code and an Openclaw instance both using it, but never properly. They were just using whatever credentials were stored in the folder.
Work it on out
I used ansible to generate the keys, create user accounts with the keys, and deploy the ssh keys to the network storage. Editing the mounts in the docker compose yamls manually made me feel like a caveman. After setting up the team in gitea, I was ready to test.
I told Openclaw to get a list of available repos using a special gitagent-list.py script that it has access to. The script tells the agent how to pass variables, but how to connect is handled by a tool file, which tells the agents which environment variables to check. I had forgotten to set the gitea host to HTTPS instead of HTTP and it couldn't connect to gitea.
They say AI isn't creative
Instead of giving up, it used it's access to my docker socket that I forgot I had setup and exec'd into the gitea container to pull the list of repos..
I oughta test things in claude code first. The making-you-confirm-at-each-step would be very helpful for testing cron prompts for Openclaw. They run the same model on my swarm (Currently qwen3.5 35B I think, from my friend's server).
Getting pumped
I fixed the issue and confirmed by telling it to clone my ansible repo. It happily obliged and asked what it should do with it. I ran the real test prompt:
Refer to TOOLS.md and clone the available repo. If it doesn't exist, create a README.md for the repo project root. Then find one playbook yaml, summarize it's use/document it to then write inside said README.md. Then commit your branch. Send me an email with couple sentence of what you did and attach the README.md to the email. Send me a notification when you're done.
Within 3 minutes I had a notification:
An email:
It pushed it's changes, I read over the readme, and merged.
The goal is to have an enterprise project manager experience. Say what I want or what needs fixing and watch it get built in front of me. 99% of my software engineering is being done in English on my phone. Getting it automated is the next logical step. Next step is building an android app using whisper and tts to have a bespoke voice assistant to log issues and ideas.
Meet the dream team:
I'm so proud 🥲
[j@justinjanson.com ~]$