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Agent Purple Solo dev Proxmox LAN ideas → ← features CollectHive Team platform DigitalOcean DEVIATIONS.md

The Upstream Relationship

22 Mar 2026 · Tristan Wright

Built on Agent Purple

CollectHive is built on top of Agent Purple, an open-source AI agent platform created by Luke. Agent Purple is excellent at what it does: giving a single technically-minded developer a powerful AI assistant running on their own hardware. CollectHive takes that same foundation and reshapes it for teams, where multiple people need access, security matters, and not everyone has a technical background.

Technical detail

Agent Purple describes itself as “a self-hosted AI agent platform with persistent memory, semantic search, and a web interface for chatting with Claude.” It runs via Docker Compose on a local machine or a Linux server, with Convex as the database. Out of the box it ships with no authentication enabled, which is fine for a solo developer on a private machine but unsuitable for a shared team environment.

A Collaborative Relationship

Tristan works directly with Luke, shares feedback, and contributes ideas that sometimes make their way back into the original project. Features flow in both directions. Because there is no shared codebase or branch connecting the two projects, Luke can move as fast as he likes without worrying about breaking CollectHive’s build, and we can make our own changes without affecting his.

Agent Purple moves quickly. On a productive day it’s not unusual to see 18 or more updates in a single sitting. Recent additions include a remote browser for handling web logins, an automated code-review loop using CodeRabbit (which now also gates deployments), and deeper admin tools for managing users. We watch all of that closely and pull in anything that fits how CollectHive works.

Technical detail

We track Agent Purple’s commit history directly and review changes before adopting them. Notable recent additions include: a noVNC remote browser for auth flows, a CodeRabbit-driven auto-fix and auto-merge pipeline, CodeRabbit as a hard gate on Proxmox deployments, and admin role management in the Users section.

Why the Two Projects Differ

Agent Purple is built for one person. CollectHive is built for a team. That single difference drives almost everything else.

Agent Purple is also designed with structural separation in mind — each team or department installs and runs their own instance, keeping their data and tools entirely to themselves. CollectHive is different. It’s built more like a startup: everyone is in the same room, context flows freely, and the whole point is that the team thinks and works together as one.

Technical detail

Agent Purple ships with anonymous access enabled by default and mounts the Docker socket directly, which is acceptable for a solo local deployment but creates real risks in a shared environment. CollectHive requires Clerk authentication, role-based access control, credential seeding so non-technical users never handle API keys, and admin oversight at every layer. These changes affect close to every file in the stack.

How We Stay in Sync

We keep a careful record of everywhere CollectHive has diverged from Agent Purple. That record lets us review new Agent Purple updates quickly and decide what to bring across, without accidentally pulling in assumptions that don’t fit a team deployment.

Technical detail

Around 988 files are shared between the two codebases, with 45 or more that always differ. These are tracked line-by-line in a file called DEVIATIONS.md. We never merge directly from Agent Purple. Every change is reviewed and either cherry-picked or rewritten to fit our model. We run weekly drift reports to catch gaps before they compound.