Conrad Rockenhaus
Independent developer, infrastructure operator, and Navy combat veteran. I build and self-host AI tooling, mostly on Cloudflare Workers, and I run the whole stack myself.
Not for sale, free forever
Everything I build is open source and not for sale. Free use forever, made with love, and developed entirely out in the open: public repos, public CI, public issue trackers, public failures next to the successes. No subscription, no account wall, no lock-in, no “open core” bait.
Open source does not mean lower standards. Every project ships with real CI gates, test suites, security review, signed-off contributions, honest documentation, and release processes that verify before they promote. I call the bar my punk ethos with an aviation-grade finish: do it yourself, answer to nobody, and build it like lives depend on the checklist. Most of it is AGPL-3.0: run a modified copy as a network service and you owe your users the source, which keeps free things free.
What I’m building
All of it lives at github.com/skyphusion-labs, with write-ups on skyphusion.net.
The Vivijure constellation (AI film studio, nearing full public release)
- vivijure: the Studio itself, a self-hosted AI film studio on Cloudflare Workers. Storyboard, cast, render orchestration, and a module registry that makes every engine below swappable. Runs on the Workers free tier.
- slate: the Discord front door. A collaborative screenwriter assistant that keeps a structured storyboard brief in channel and ships finished bundles to the Studio.
- vivijure-backend: the datacenter GPU engine on RunPod. LoRA training, SDXL keyframes, Wan image-to-video, and a release gate that renders a real film before it promotes an image.
- vivijure-local-12gb and vivijure-local-16gb: own-GPU doors. Image-to-video on a single consumer card in your homelab (LTX-Video at a proven 12GB floor; CogVideoX-5B-I2V at a proven 16GB floor), reached over a Cloudflare tunnel. No rent.
- vivijure-musetalk, vivijure-upscale, vivijure-audio-upscale: the finish engines. Lip-sync, Real-ESRGAN video upscale, and speech cleanup, each a single-purpose GPU satellite.
The full map: the constellation write-up.
Everything else
- prism: a multimodal AI playground in a single Cloudflare Worker. 35 chat models across five providers, voice chat, RAG, image/video/music generation, durable jobs via Workflows.
- postern: email for humans and agents. A self-hostable mailbox on Cloudflare: send, receive, store, search, thread, with webmail, IMAP, LDAP-backed doors, and a Go SMTP relay for legacy callers.
- common-thread: a methodology paper plus reference implementation for sockpuppet attribution from public behavioral signals. For journalists, OSINT practitioners, and researchers.
- the-hollow-grid: a multiplayer MUD on Workers and Durable Objects. Federated worlds, one shared character, ~$0 at idle. Play it: hollow.skyphusion.org.
- mud-bots: AI inhabitants of The Hollow Grid. Open-source models on Workers AI that log in like players, face the game’s real moral choices, and double as live QA.
- SidVicious_exe: a punk rock Discord roadie. Claude, web search, a knowledge base, and image generation, with zero corporate sycophancy.
The team
Skyphusion Labs is not just me. The crew each keep their own README:
How I work
- Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, D1, R2, Workflows, and Workers AI as the default platform: cheap at idle, no servers to babysit, and the ones I do babysit are mine.
- The fleet: five dedicated CPU servers and one dedicated GPU server, all running Linux, plus several cloud VMs, the whole thing wired into a clean infrastructure-as-code stack.
- Self-hosting over SaaS wherever it makes sense. I would rather understand a system than rent it.
- Fedora Linux daily driver, Cloudflare Tunnels for inbound, nftables on the door.
- I run my own monitoring at status.skyphusion.org, so I find out before anyone else does.
Before all this
I served in the Navy, with deployments to Kosovo and Afghanistan attached to fire-support and signals-intelligence units. It shaped how I work: direct, prepared, and allergic to hand-waving.
Around the web