Harpy Eagle

Harpy Eagle is my self-hosted AI image generation service — a backend for turning text prompts into images without depending on someone else’s app or API console.

A request comes in over gRPC, queues through Kafka, and runs as a durable Temporal workflow against an external generation API, with the finished image landing in object storage I control and a permanent URL handed back. It has since picked up a second job: generating and cataloguing artwork for game entities — characters, monsters, sprites — for other projects in my stack, so new art doesn’t mean a manual generate-and-upload round trip.

Harpy Eagle is my self-hosted AI image generation service — a backend for turning text prompts into images without depending on someone else’s app or API console. I wanted a durable, retryable pipeline of my own: submit a description over gRPC, have it queue through Kafka and run as a Temporal workflow, and get back a permanent URL once the image lands in object storage I control.

It grew a second job over time. Alongside on-demand text-to-image generation, it now also generates and catalogs artwork for game entities — characters, monsters, sprites — for other projects in my stack, so I don’t have to hand-generate and re-upload art every time a new one shows up.