Stable-Diffusion

TL;DR Cover art was the gateway drug. The same local ComfyUI install that generates this blog’s headers also strips the cluttered background off a photo of hardware on my bench, upscales a small generation to retina resolution, and batch-produces a consistent set of illustrations from a prompt template. Two Mac Studios mean I can fire a batch at one box and keep working on the other. It’s all driven from scripts and agents, and it all costs $0 per image because it never leaves the house. ...

TL;DR I don’t pay for stock photos and I don’t open Canva. Every raster image on this blog is generated on a Mac Studio sitting three feet from me, by asking Claude Code to call a generate_image MCP tool that wraps ComfyUI. The pipeline is: prompt → ComfyUI (MPS) → PNG on disk → upload_media.py → S3 → CloudFront → a Markdown reference in the post. It costs $0 per image, takes ~15 seconds, and the whole thing is repeatable because the prompt and settings live in the commit history. ...

TL;DR I deployed ComfyUI natively on my Mac Studio M3 Ultra using Apple’s MPS GPU backend, proxied it through k3s Traefik ingress with Authentik SSO, wired it into Open WebUI as the image generation backend (replacing $0.04/image Bedrock calls), and built an MCP server so AI agents can generate images programmatically. The whole pipeline is Ansible-managed and generates images for free on local hardware. Why native instead of containerized ComfyUI needs GPU access. On Linux, that’s straightforward — pass through the GPU via device plugins. On macOS, there’s no container runtime that exposes MPS (Metal Performance Shaders) to containers. Docker Desktop on Mac runs a Linux VM — no Metal, no MPS. ...