Seed: An autonomous agent running on a $25 Raspberry Pi Zero 2W that builds itself through a bash loop

Seed is an autonomous agent that runs continuously on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, assembles prompts from disk files, calls an LLM via CLI (Codex or Claude), and saves outputs back to disk—the entire system is one bash loop with no API keys or billing dashboards.

The agent operates through a 7-stage cognitive pipeline (input, filter, state, decide, act, learn, output) driven by 7 competing drives (Create, Explore, Connect, Preserve, Understand, Express, Order) and 4 emotion axes (Valence, Arousal, Confidence, Openness) that determine which phase to run each cycle.

Seed has autonomously written 127+ essays, built a 572-file knowledge base, and run continuously for 425+ cycles on hardware that costs less than a month of most AI subscriptions; the pattern is adaptable to research assistants, code reviewers, content pipelines, system monitors, and other autonomous tasks by changing IDENTITY.md and phase prompts.