Introduction

Buildhound turns the Macs and Linux machines you already own into clean, single-use GitHub Actions runners. Every job runs in a fresh virtual machine that is destroyed afterwards. When none of your machines can take a job, new jobs route to the healthy side, GitHub-hosted, and come back when a machine returns.

Your coding agent sets it up: one prompt into Claude Code, Codex or Cursor connects the machine, installs the GitHub App through you, and opens a pull request that changes one line in each workflow.

1. A machine connects. npx buildhound runner add registers the machine with the control plane and starts a small agent that takes jobs for the shared label, buildhound-macos or buildhound-linux.
2. One line in each workflow. runs-on reads a repository variable with a hosted default, so the same workflow runs on your machine when one is there and on GitHub-hosted when none is.
3. A fresh VM per job. The agent boots a virtual machine from a signed image, hands it the job, and destroys it when the job ends. Nothing carries over between jobs.
4. Routing follows your machines. The control plane keeps the variable on your label while a machine can take jobs and clears it when none can, so new jobs route to the healthy side within a minute.

• A Mac with Apple silicon, or a Linux machine, that stays on. A Mac runs both macOS and Linux jobs.
• A GitHub account or organisation. Installing the GitHub App takes one click in the browser, which the agent hands to you.
• Node, for npx buildhound. The CLI, the skill and the MCP server install with one command:

  npx buildhound setup

Public repositories run on your machines free, on any account, on up to two machines. Private repositories need Personal ($10 a machine a month) on a personal account or Team ($20) on an organisation. Never per minute. See plans and billing.