Overseer Self-hosted command center for every machine

overview

Overseer turns a collection of desktops, laptops, homelab boxes, and cloud VMs into one operable fleet. A hub serves the web interface while agents dial outward over WebSockets, allowing machines behind NAT and firewalls to join without SSH key distribution or inbound port forwarding.

problem

Running coding agents and long-lived tasks across several machines usually means fragmented SSH sessions, platform-specific setup, fragile credentials, and no shared operational view. The challenge was to make the secure path simpler than the improvised one across three operating systems and two CPU architectures.

approach

I designed the hub, device agent, CLI, and MCP server as modes of one static Go binary with the web UI embedded. Linux and macOS terminals persist through tmux; Windows uses native ConPTY. Platform installers handle systemd, launchd, and Scheduled Tasks, while checksummed updates, rollback, Tailscale setup, and short-lived enrollment tokens keep operations recoverable.

outcome

The result is a working cross-platform fleet controller that can install a machine with one pasted command, keep sessions alive, launch and supervise coding agents, expose files and telemetry, and let another agent operate the fleet through a bounded MCP tool surface.

selected details

• Linux, macOS, and Windows builds for amd64 and arm64
• Single embedded binary for hub, device agent, CLI, UI, and MCP server
• Persistent terminals, coding-agent launch, fleet files, telemetry, and health checks
• Checksummed auto-update with rollback and private Tailscale access