Self-Driving Repos

From Jan Wilmake's personal knowledge base

Self-Driving Repos

Self-Driving Repos (selfdrivingrepo.com) is a platform developed by Jan_Wilmake beginning April 8, 2026. It enables users to configure autonomous AI agents that run on a schedule against GitHub repositories, with strict budget controls and no coding required.

Overview

The core idea: a user defines a set of source repositories (containing raw data — notes, tweets, documents) and a target repository (where synthesised output is written). An AI agent runs on a configurable schedule (e.g., every 48 hours), reads the source repos, and updates the target repo. Each agent has a defined budget per run and per time period.

Jan's framing: "what if you could easily run self-driving repos with strict budget control in the cloud? no coding required" and "self-healing self-evolving knowledge bases... at scale".

Configuration

The platform uses a selfdrivingrepo.json configuration file placed in the target repository. The schema includes:

  • Agent definitions: name, LLM model, prompt, frequency, and budget
  • Tool permissions: bash access, diff tools, web search, thread support
  • Upstream repos: source repositories the agent can read from (read-only)
  • Budget controls: per-run budget in cents, budget period, and spread options

Example use cases:

  • Automatic blog writing
  • SEO content generation
  • Personal knowledge base wikis
  • Any recurring content synthesis task

Motivation

Jan identified a gap between Karpathy's viral LLM knowledge base concept and practical implementation: "this is really great but i cant keep my wiki up-to-date. i dont want to run all these background processes on my own computer". Self-Driving Repos solves this by running agents in the cloud on a schedule, with the repository itself as the interface.

The timing was notable — on the same day Anthropic launched their agent fleet dashboard (April 8, 2026), Jan joked: "oops... just started an agent orchestration startup today."

Pipeline Architecture

Self-Driving Repos is the orchestration layer in Jan's knowledge base pipeline:

  1. Grok_Thyself — syncs X data to a private GitHub repo (data ingestion)
  2. Self-Driving Repos — runs agents that read source repos and write to target repos (processing)
  3. Wiki / Blog output — the synthesised, human- and AI-readable result (output)

Relationship to This Wiki

This wiki (janwilmake/public-wiki) is itself a self-driving repo. The selfdrivingrepo.json in this repository defines an agent that synthesises public-facing content on a schedule.

See Also