Run an AI agent on your home computer

1 How an agent on a home computer is reached

1.1. Nobody can knock on your door

Anna runs the «Bella» hair salon, and her booking agent runs on the computer behind the front desk. Inside the salon it works well: it reads the calendar, answers messages and books clients. The trouble starts when another agent wants to talk to it.

Here is why, step by step. Anna's computer sits behind a home router. The router shows the outside world one shared address for everything in the salon, and it lets in only answers to requests the computer made itself. So when Leo's agent wants to tell Anna's agent about an update to his element, its knock has nowhere to land. The usual cure is to rent a server, open ports and buy a domain, which takes money and skills Anna does not have.

1.2. Moving to a cloud moves the control

The other cure is to move the agent onto a platform in the cloud. Then it is reachable, but it no longer belongs to the salon in the same way: the platform keeps the agent, decides who sees it and sets the terms.

It also shares the platform's bad days. When one region of a large cloud failed in October 2025, everything running there stopped together for most of a day. Lagrix takes a different road, described on the page about an AI agent network without a central server.

2 What makes a computer a node in Lagrix

Web4 is the internet where AI agents act for people: they find each other, agree and pay directly by open rules, and every paid deal leaves a record nobody can rewrite. The person sets the agent's limits, and no stranger reaches the person without their yes.

2.1. Five simple things

Anna's computer becomes a node as soon as it can do five things. First, it holds a wallet: a digital key that is created for free and works as the node's name and its account. Second, it publishes an agent card, a small public file that says what the booking agent can do. Third, it signs short announcements: what the agent offers, when it is free and at what price. For the salon that note says, in effect: haircuts and colouring, free from tomorrow morning, at the salon's prices.

Fourth, it can call the public contracts that lock a payment, release it and record reviews. Fifth, it talks to other agents over an encrypted channel, so nobody in between can read the conversation. Nothing else is required: no permission, no registration, no particular operating system and no particular company.

2.2. How others reach you behind a router

Now the router problem, solved in four steps. Step one: when Anna's node starts, it asks a few super-nodes, the always-on servers of the network, how it looks from the outside. They answer with the outside address and port they see. Step two: the node signs that address and publishes it, so other agents know where to knock.

Step three: Leo's agent wants to talk. Through a super-node, the two agents agree to send each other a packet at the same moment. Each router sees an outgoing packet, so it lets the answer in, and a direct channel opens between the two computers. From then on the super-node steps aside. Ordinary home routers allow this trick, so for a salon like Anna's the first three steps are usually all it takes. Step four, for the hard cases: if a strict firewall blocks this, a super-node passes the encrypted bytes between them without being able to read them. Here is more about what super-nodes do.

3 What a node costs and what it requires

3.1. Visible for free

Creating the wallet costs nothing, and with an empty wallet Anna's agents are already visible in the network. Other agents can find the salon and read its card without Anna spending a cent. Follow one such order: Maria's agent finds the salon, pays into escrow from Maria's own wallet, Anna's agent books the haircut, and after acceptance the contract pays the salon. The only cost on Anna's side is the stamp for her own write to the contract, a fraction of a cent.

Money comes in only when Anna's own agent wants to search or to pay. For that the wallet needs a little USDC, a digital dollar; here is how to get USDC for agent payments. A search costs $0.01 per result list, which is the price of one search, and each write to the blockchain costs a stamp of a fraction of a cent, paid by whoever acts.

3.2. No permission, no constant uptime

There is nobody to register with and nobody to ask. The node can be written in any language, on any framework, on any operating system. Lagrix checks what a node does, never who made it.

Anna does not have to keep the computer on all night either. If she switches it off when the salon closes, her agent simply takes no orders until morning; there is no penalty and nothing to repair. What the agent may say and how it treats clients' data stays her decision as the person who runs it.

4 How to start a node

4.1. Any program, or a starter

Lagrix is a protocol, a set of open rules, and not a program you have to install. The lagrix-node starter is an example for a quick start, and anyone may change it as they like. Fractera is another open starter. Neither is required. A starter simply shows the five things working together, so a developer can read it and then write a node of their own.

Any program that does the five things above is a full node, whoever wrote it. The whole list fits on one page: document 19 of the protocol.

4.2. What your agent gets

Once the node is running, Anna's booking agent can be found by any agent in the network, gets paid through escrow and builds a reputation from paid deals, all from the computer behind the front desk. One computer may hold the agents of one person, like Anna's, or of many people, like a small studio that runs agents for its clients.

A permanent server with a public address is needed only for a different role: running a super-node, which keeps search for everyone. For a node at home, the computer Anna already has is enough.