about

I'm MTrav. Solo developer. I build and think about AI agents, realtime systems, and self hosted infrastructure, with a standing weakness for anything that looks like a console from a future that never quite arrived.

Most of what I make falls into a few buckets: agent runtimes and tooling, realtime data systems, terminal and CLI software, and the infrastructure to keep it all running on hardware I own. Things like Argus (a realtime situational awareness globe fusing world events with live satellite tracks), Styx (a self hosted console for many terminals at once, because I wanted my terminals to work the way I think), and Threx (a self hosted agent runtime, a Python brain over a Rust core). The throughline is systems with real stakes and a lot of moving parts, understood end to end.

Now the part I actually care about. A few things I believe about technology:

• Own the stack. If I can reasonably self host it, I do. Renting your tools means renting your agency. I would rather run something myself and understand it than hand it to a silo and hope.
• The whole machine should be knowable. Computers were not meant to be sealed appliances. The good stuff happens when you can open the box, read the protocol, and change the behavior. CLIs, open standards, and plain text files beat black boxes almost every time.
• Local and yours by default. Local first compute, your data on your own domain, plain files you can still grep in ten years. The corporate web traded agency for convenience and called it progress. I will take the harder, weirder path that keeps me in control of the machine instead of the other way around.
• Cyberpunk is a stance, not a skin. High agency, hands on the hardware, a healthy suspicion of centralized power. The neon is fun, but the point is autonomy.

This site runs on those terms: my own domain, my own files, no algorithm deciding what you see and nobody metering your attention. Posts on the home page, conversation in the chatroom, and other people worth reading over on the links page.