I think so! You independently stumbled upon the "China brain" thought experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain - is "the nation of china simulating a brain" conscious?
https://github.com/ehrlich-b/wingthing - Here's my version of this idea which is agent agnostic. Not exactly the same idea, "sandbox'ed persistent agent", in my case available over the web with xterm.js (though you can also just run locally).
https://github.com/ehrlich-b/wingthing Here’s my take on this idea, also FOSS. Does tmux style sessions so you can come and go. It also exposes a web terminal so you can get remote access - but you can also run fully locally for less latency.
I had sort of the same idea. https://wingthing.ai/ This idea started at “sandbox” and worked its way toward “remote access”. But same thoughts about muxing sessions. Love being able to leave and reattach while an agent is working. I’ll give yours a shot!
Hey, sorry I missed your comment - it can be self hosted. Both the cinch worker and cinch server are self hostable. For my projects I run a cinch worker on my local machine, and the cinch server (which receives webhooks) runs on cinch.sh. But, again, you could self-host the cinch.sh webhook receiver portion.
RE: Makefile. The point is that the runner just runs a command - meaning the CI doesn't have an opinion on what that command should be. All my projects use make - but you could just run `go build` instead! The cinch yaml typically has two keys - the build command and the release command, that's it.