serverside.chat

Every room gets a server and a clanker. Have fun!

serverside.chat is a shared terminal-style chat for building small websites together. A room contains the conversation, a live website, its source history, and a quiet clanker that can make changes when useful. This is all backed by wasm (non-POSIX) VMs to be lightweight and fairly constrained.

Use it over SSH:

ssh -p 2222 serverside.chat

Stuff to know

The interface is keyboard-first. Press Tab to open the room bar, use the arrow keys to move, and press Enter to select. Type / in chat to see the available commands.

Useful commands:

/invite              create a contributor invite link
/mount               show local filesystem mounting instructions
/shell               show SSH shell instructions
/edit <path>         edit a room file
/permissions         inspect the room policy
/clanker <request>   explicitly ask the clanker (this is required to ship commits to main)

Each signed-in person can create up to five rooms for now. Rooms may be public or private, and contributions may be limited to invited members, room admins, nobody, or—dangerously—any signed-in viewer.

Editing outside chat

The room has a shell but cannot run arbitrary programs. It exposes only bounded room files and predefined version-control operations:

ssh -t -p 2222 serverside.chat shell hello-world
sftp -P 2222 serverside.chat
sshfs -p 2222 serverside.chat:/hello-world ./hello-world

Inside a room, /mount also explains Finder's built-in WebDAV flow. Run ssh -p 2222 serverside.chat account to connect an SSH key to a canonical Google or GitHub account.

Run locally

You need Bun and ssh-keygen.

bun install
bun run start

Then connect:

ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null localhost -p 2222

The browser interface is available on port 3000 by default. Set FIREWORKS_API_KEY to enable the clankers; without it, chat and room services still run.

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For clankers and operators

This section is the compact implementation map. Detailed contracts live in:

• Guest service API
• Capability shell, editor, SFTP, and WebDAV
• Accounts and room policies
• Security model
• Rate limits
• Deployment procedure
• Pentest disposition

Core invariants

• A room owns one chat, one complete Git repository, one canonical service, room-scoped SQLite and scratch storage, telemetry, and temporary previews.
• https://<room>.serverside.chat is the guest site. https://serverside.chat/room/<room> is its trusted development chat.
• Every path below a room origin belongs to its generic guest handler. The host reserves only __ref for deployment selection.
• Guest worker.js runs in a fresh QuickJS WebAssembly isolate per request. It never binds a socket or receives Node.js, Bun, a shell, environment variables, host paths, raw SQLite paths, or arbitrary network access.
• The supported guest surface is bounded request, Response, env.assets, env.db, env.fs, env.log, and env.realtime.
• Host-owned authorization, routing, telemetry, limits, and deployment state are not controllable by room code.

Source and deployments

Room repositories live below .data/rooms/<room>/repo. Working-tree files are capped at 512 KiB each and 5 MiB total. SQLite and runtime scratch storage are independently capped at 5 MiB each.

History is linear and rebase-only. stable identifies the canonical commit; head identifies repository HEAD. Any valid commit is lazily servable with ?__ref=<commit>. Registered previews add a durable description and HUD entry. Publishing must fast-forward stable, contain no merge commits, and requires explicit owner authority.

New rooms include serverside.css, a flat Zenburn, information-first design baseline. Clankers receive the rules in prompts/clanker/design.md and may read the exact stylesheet through a host-owned tool. Explicit human art direction wins, and established room designs are not silently replaced.

Clanker behavior

The normal prompt is assembled from prompts/clanker/. The lobby guide and anonymous moderation prompts are separate and have fewer capabilities.

Clankers are quiet engineering utilities:

• Social chatter is ignored.
• Completed work becomes a commit and preview; the host posts the formatted status instead of prose.
• Clarifying questions are rare and reserved for consequential ambiguity or permission boundaries.
• Direct technical answers must be terse and deterministically grounded in code or deployment state.
• File and Git access is available only through predefined, room-scoped tools. There is no shell tool.
• Telemetry must remain intact unless an authenticated human explicitly requests its removal and acknowledges the visibility loss.

Provider calls are serialized per room. Normal runs have a 15-minute total deadline, five-minute provider waits, a two-minute finalization reserve, and a 256-turn ceiling. The primary spend boundary is a durable rolling output-token quota: 1M per room per hour and 8M globally per hour by default. Input tokens do not count toward these quotas.

Identity and permissions

The internal user ID is canonical. Google/GitHub identities, browser cookies, and SSH public keys are credentials that resolve to it; handles are display labels, not authority.

Public rooms permit anonymous reading. Anonymous writing is allowed only in the lobby after bounded, fail-closed model moderation. The authenticated contribution policy deliberately permits any signed-in account that can view a room to chat, edit source, and invoke its configured clanker; it does not grant membership, moderation, invitations, publishing, or admin authority.

Canonical promotion is owner-only and is exposed to the clanker only during an explicit owner /clanker request. Passive transcript text cannot grant authority.

Configuration

Important environment variables:

HOST=0.0.0.0
PORT=2222
WEB_HOST=127.0.0.1
WEB_PORT=3000
DATA_DIR=.data
WEB_BASE_URL=https://serverside.chat
ROOM_SITE_DOMAIN=serverside.chat
ROOM_OWNER=your-handle
SSH_BOOTSTRAP_KEYS=/path/to/owner.pub

FIREWORKS_API_KEY=...
FIREWORKS_MODEL=accounts/fireworks/models/deepseek-v4p1-flash
FIREWORKS_CLASSIFIER_MODEL=accounts/fireworks/models/glm-5p3-flash
CLANKER_ROOM_TOKENS_PER_HOUR=1000000
CLANKER_GLOBAL_TOKENS_PER_HOUR=8000000

GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=...
GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET=...
GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=...
GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=...
DEVELOPMENT_AUTH=false

Production runs as an unprivileged systemd service behind Caddy. Releases are immutable commit-named directories under /opt/serverside-chat/releases; persistent room data lives under /var/lib/serverside-chat. Follow the deployment procedure rather than copying a working tree or local secrets.