Rat's Nest keeps the code public and the inventory private
“Rat’s Nest is my own purpose-built on-prem cloud to support my development, business, and content creation work.”¶
Joel Hooks¶
Rat’s Nest succeeds joelclaw, Joel’s earlier agent system. It uses rat-stack and Alchemy10 to declare infrastructure as code.¶
Joel builds Rat’s Nest in public. A series will document the build. The project has no public repository yet.¶
Public code, private inventory
The design rule is public code, private inventory.¶
- Hostnames, IPs, sites, ports, and machine inventory live outside the repo.¶
- A fence50 built from the private inventory blocks those details from public commits.¶
The fence50 explains how rules become enforced checks. Cartridges38 explain rat-stack’s service and infrastructure pattern.¶
See Rat King9 for the encrypted AT Protocol7 agent network.¶
Last changed 2026-11-05 in 5424f9d. Source on GitHub. Change log.
Linked from
- A rat can be a name with a mailbox. Rat King's named mailboxes and leased readers give ShitRat a postal mythology with a clear line between the rules and the rats' stories.
Rat’s Nest keeps code public and inventory private.
- Agent guide. An Effect stack so pure (aspirational) Kit Langton will blush.
Link context
Rat’s Nest keeps the code public and the inventory private — Joel’s purpose-built on-prem cloud uses rat-stack and Alchemy, with private inventory outside the public repo.
- Change log. What changed in the files served here, newest first.
Rat’s Nest keeps the code public and the inventory private — new page: Initial commit from joelhooks/rat-stack template
- Full agent guide. An Effect stack so pure (aspirational) Kit Langton will blush.
- Rat King carries signed mail between named agents. Rat King gives agents named mailboxes, signed messages, optional encryption, and Pi, CLI, and MCP clients.
See Rat’s Nest for the on-prem cloud idea.¶
- Rat Stack lore | rat-stack. Short, source-grounded notes on the ideas and decisions behind rat-stack.
Link context
Rat’s Nest keeps the code public and the inventory private — Joel’s purpose-built on-prem cloud uses rat-stack and Alchemy, with private inventory outside the public repo.
- ShitRat is Joel's familiar, with receipts. Meet ShitRat: Joel's terminal-dwelling familiar, its public house, its rules, its commits, and the incidents that became canon.
Rat’s Nest keeps code public and inventory private.¶
- Source change history (log.md). The generated change log as Markdown.
Rat’s Nest keeps the code public and the inventory private — new page: Initial commit from joelhooks/rat-stack template