Build a two-agent doorman on a small VPS
A developer split a public visitor-facing agent from a private scheduling agent to keep contact handling on a tight budget.
- What they did
- George Larson ran a small Zig agent called nullclaw on a low-cost VPS and connected it to his own IRC server, which people reached through a web client. The public agent answered questions from preloaded context and checked claims by cloning public GitHub repositories. When someone wanted email or scheduling help, it handed that job to a private agent named ironclaw over A2A through Tailscale; ironclaw had access to email and calendar, and Larson wrote the client tool for that handoff himself.
- How it went
- The setup worked for visitors: Haiku handled chat and Sonnet handled repository reading. It was not perfect, and Larson shut the whole system down after it ran from March to June 2026.
- Tips
- The agent itself was the easy part; the harder work was tightening the VPS, DNS, TLS, and Cloudflare setup. Keep the public agent on a short leash so it can only pass limited requests to the private side.
Try it yourself with OpenClaw
Help me design a two-agent setup on my [small VPS]. One agent should greet visitors on [my IRC server / chat channel / website] and answer basic questions about [me / my project] using a short context file and public code checks when needed. A second private agent should handle [email] and [calendar] tasks through [A2A / another internal link], with access to those accounts. Keep daily cost under [$2]. Before any irreversible action, pause and show me exactly what will be sent or changed, then wait for my approval. Also show me the config and the cost controls when you’re done.
Fill in the [brackets]. Agents can make mistakes, so review anything before it is sent, paid or deleted.
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