Why Housecat?

By Noah Zoschke noah@housecat.com

In 2025 we entered the “AI era” of knowledge work with agents and software development with agentic coding. While there has a massive leap forward is what is possible with an LLM at your side, we have taken a step backwards in knowing how to best use all the cutting-edge tools.

Testing AI tools feels like selecting one of many brand new models of spaceships then taking it for a joy ride and often crashing. It’s an exhilarating glimpse of the future, but most of us would prefer our trusty bicycle to get around day to day.

We have seen this play out before…

In 2005 we entered the “cloud era” of knowledge work with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and software development with application frameworks and Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS).

We converged on the practice of “DevOps” with tools like GitHub and Trello for collaboration and “Ruby on Rails” and Heroku for building and deploying apps.

What is Housecat?

Housecat aims to be a bicycle for the AI era.

We give you and your team an AI powered server that is pre-configured for simplicity and safety. It has simple, modern, integrated equivalents of Trello, GitHub, Ruby on Rails and Heroku built in for you and your team easily write, review and deploy all the prompts, skills, scripts, and apps that help you get work done.

How does Housecat work?

We believe a simple foundation for computing and development is more important than ever for those coming to it for the first time (“vibe coders”), seasoned experts (“wizards”), and our agents (“paid interns”) to all learn and collaborate around.

The computer is a classic “UNIX” server:

  • Linux OS
  • Users and home directories - Docs, scripts, and programs
  • Processes for one-off tasks (data import, summary report)
  • Cron jobs for scheduled tasks (hourly backups, daily reports)
  • Services for 24/7 programs (web server, AI agent)

The app is a classic “devops” workflow of continual iteration and collaboration between your peers and agents:

  • Chat to explore a problem space
  • Write a human-friendly planning document
  • Run a document and iterate to validate
  • Code scripts, tests and apps for mission critical tools

Housecat provides “rails” for creating new chats / docs / scripts:

  • Chat examples and skills
  • Doc templates and linters
  • Code scaffolding

And “guard rails” for keeping things running securely and smoothly:

  • OAuth, OIDC and MCP so there are no secrets on the box
  • Audit logs and approval workflows in https://auth.housecat.com so the Agent has constraints
  • Daily backups of home directories
← Housecat CLI
Help & Community →