← Back to search

How to Build Your Own Agent OS FREE

AI News Today | Julian Goldie Podcast · 2026-09-15 · 8 min
relevance 85 1694 words Episode page ↗ Audio ↗
✨ Episode Outline — click any point to jump to it in the episode
Problem solved
How to build and run an agentic operating system entirely for free, without paid APIs.
Benefits
  • Zero cost: free open-source harness plus free models
  • All agents and custom automations in one mission-control dashboard
  • Replaces n8n entirely — no node configuration or custom API wiring
  • Iterate custom workflows (ads builder, web design OS) via feedback loops
  • Locally hosted web app you fully control
Use cases
  • Built a mission-control dashboard web app hosted locally to run all AI agents
  • Built a web design OS custom automation that generates web designs on demand
  • Built a custom ad-creation tool inside the agent OS
  • Ran a video editor, memory galaxy, and SEO agent from one agent OS
Tools / build
  • Agent OS mission-control dashboard
  • OpenCode with free OpenRouter models
  • Hermes Agent
  • Web design OS automation
  • Custom ad-creation tool
0:00 / 0:00
So, agentic operating systems are some of the most powerful things you can build for your business and for personal stuff in general. Simply because it can quickly have all of your agents in one place, you can operate them, you can build custom workflows. So, for example, we have like a video editor over here, we have a memory galaxy, we have, for example, an SEO agent. And these are all amazing things that you can build into this. But most people think, oh, you need to pay for the APIs to do all this sort of thing. Actually, today I'm going to show you how to build an agentic operating system for free. And we'll just build it from scratch and I'll show you some example prompts and stuff that you can build with this. And also show you how to operate it for free as well. So once you've built it, you can actually plug in free systems into your agentic OS to keep using it for free. So let's get straight into this. And I'm going to show you the first place I would start. So what you can actually do is you can use a free open source harness to build this app, right? So that's step number one. So, for example, if you were interested in building out an agentic operating system for free, I would start with DeepSeek Harness or I would go with something like Hermes Agent. Both of those are like free agentic harnesses. They're free, they're open source and you can build some cool stuff with it. Now, you might say, OK, that's great. The harness is free. But what about the model? How do you get a free model for these systems? So you've got a few options here. Number one is that you can use something like OpenCode as the brain of your agentic harness. And you can use this inside Hermes Agent. You can also use this inside, for example, DeepSeek Harness. All right. So if we break this down into steps, step number one is you're going to build the agent OS. I'm actually going to write this down. I think it'd be better written. How? You can use DeepSeek Harness or Hermes Agent. Both of those are free agentic harnesses. And then you're going to ask, well, how do you get a free model to plug into your agentic harness? You can use OpenCode or you could use something like a free API. So, for example, OpenRouter, if you type in free here, there's loads of different free models that you can plug into your harness. Right. So, for example, you've got LightLink 3.0 Flash. You've got, for example, LFM 2.5. You've got all of these different free APIs you can plug in, which is pretty cool. So you've picked your free harness and model. That is stage number one. Now, stage number two is you want to start building. So where do you start? Well, let's say, for example, you're using OpenCode with free APIs to build out your agentic OS. Yes. You would go inside a new session here. Right. So you're going to start a new session and then you're going to say inside here and you'd select whichever free model you want to use. So, for example, we've got LightLink 3.0 Flash. We've got Mimo V2.5 Free. We have Muse Spark 1.3 Free. And we have Nemetron Free as well. Right. If you just type in free inside OpenCode here, you can see all the free models you can use. Nice. All right. So if we use Mimo V2.5 for free, we're just going to say, can you build out a mission control dashboard where I can see OpenCode running and I can also build like beautiful automations inside there? Should just be like a kind of web app that's hosted locally where we can build out our AI agents and have like a mission control for all our AI agents. And later I'll build out some course, course, custom automations inside there. Make it look beautiful, clean, interesting. All right. So you basically do this, as you can see, and that is the example prompt that you can use. All right. So you're going to just go into your agentic harness. It could be OpenCode, could be DPSC harness, could be Hermes agent. They all do the same thing in different ways. Then you can go into your agent and you can see here that it's beginning to build out step by step. All right. Now, once that's done, it's going to have a local host for your agent OS. What do you do from there? That brings us on to step number three. So step number three is you want to build free models into your agent OS and customize it. Let me show you what that looks like. So first of all, your agent OS is going to be super basic at first. It's not going to look as good as this, right? It's probably just going to have the mission control dashboard in and then also OpenCode. So what you want to do is just go into anything that you've built inside your agent OS. So if we go to, for example, DPSC harness over here, we can then give it some prompts and just test out if that actually works. If it doesn't work, you go back into OpenCode and you just ask it to improve it. All right. You give it feedback. You tell it what to improve. You tell it what to do better. And then you start building your own custom workflows into it. So anything that you want to build, let's say, for example, you spend a lot of time doing ads, creating ads, or you could build out a custom tool like you can see right here for building that ads. How do you do that? You go into your agent that built it and you say, hey, I've got this idea. Can you build it? So, for example, you can see when we were building our web design OS inside our agentic OS, which is basically like a custom automation that can build web designs whenever we want. We just ask it to build it. And then, you know, it didn't work perfectly first time around. That's where the testing and iterating comes in. We went back and forth with it until eventually it worked. All right. So that's basically the three-step system. You pick your free harness and model. You start building. How do you build? You're using the prompt that we talked about before. It's going to start building, as you can see right here. And then the final step is that you're going to build three models and customize it into the system. So everything that we've built here, we've just built out step by step. We've improved it. We made it a little bit better, a little bit better. Added new things inside there and just gone from there. Right. And so everything that you see here, we've built in gradually into the system just to make it better and better and improve it as we go over time. And that's all you need to do. So some people say you can't use Gentic harnesses free. You can't because you've got like open code, you've got DPC harness, you've got Hermes. Some people say, well, you can't use a free model, but you can. You can use open code. Right. And it's got some really good models inside there. Some people say the models themselves are not good. But you can see an example right here where we've actually built out the mission control dashboard that we talked about a minute ago. And that's built inside this system here. Right. And again, you see how this hasn't really shown anything. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to get that for feedback, go back into open code and say, there's nothing here. Fix this. All right. And you just go back and forth with it. Step number two, you start building. Right. As we talked about before. And then step number three, you're going to add in free models and just customize it step by step. And that's basically it. That's the whole system. I actually got a question here in the chat. And, you know, if you've got any questions you watch in live, feel free to ask. So one question we got was like, you know, how much is NA10 used inside your workflows? Literally zero. I do not use NA10 anymore. Like there's absolutely no point. The reason for that is because all of this stuff basically replaces NA10 and you can do it with no code. So with NA10, you have to like customize it, configure it, make sure it works, add custom APIs, et cetera. With this system, you don't need NA10. Right. It's just a beautiful system where you've got all your agents in one place. You've got all your custom automations in one place and you don't need to mess around with NA10, which can be really painful. So that's basically it. That's the whole system. That's how to use it. And that's how it all works together. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. But if you want this whole system with the agentic OS, feel free to get it inside the AI Profit Boardroom. Link in the comment description or just go to the AI Profit Boardroom.com. Inside the community, you can ask questions, get help and support in real time. Inside the classroom, you can get access to all of our best training systems, everything else. And then inside the calendar, you can jump on weekly coaching calls, ask questions, get help and support in real time. And in the map, you can meet people in your local area who are building out with AI agents. So feel free to get this link in the comment description or go to the AI Profit Boardroom.com. Thanks for watching.