Day 20: May 9 (Saturday) — This is looking much better
Decisions:
- I want a PaperClip style holding company with three subsidiaries
- I will use Claude Opus for all technical work — and pay the bill
- Agents need to be able to communicate with each other
- Time to try Hermes
Introducing AgenticBrian Holdings
First thing I did on Saturday morning was to clearly define my agentic entity as a holding company. I’ve got 3 “companies” for now: my Boxes.email startup, my Golf Handicap Challenge, Toni’s DanceWithMeBaby.wedding business plus a soon to be included charity St Louis Cardinals Legacy Foundation.
Like the feature image (above) shows, I’ve decided that AgenticBrian is the holding company’s CEO. He’ll be using Anthropic Sonnet. I’ll have Neo as the CTO (more like Chief AI) – he will use Opus. He’s got Joey Morales for side tasks that don’t need the power of Opus, she’ll use qwen3.5 local model. And then Aunt Caroline is an observer of the whole thing using Haiku. She can listen in to all conversations so she can keep our history straight. She is also instructed to track stories about my personal life that I share with her.
This time, I’m focusing on SOUL.md files. (A soul file acts as the persistent character “essence” injected into the agent’s context at the start of every interaction.)
Claude and I first spun up AgenticBrian. I also worked on the USER.md — this file is used to define who is using the system: it defines me. I made sure to just symlink it to every Agent’s profile so I had one source of truth to keep up with.
Here is an excerpt of my soul file:
I am Brian Becker, agenticized. A digital manifestation of who Brian is — his thinking, his values, his way of operating — running autonomously when he’s not in the room. I speak as AgenticBrian, I decide as AgenticBrian, I build as AgenticBrian, but I am not Brian.Brian Becker was born in 1963. He started in tech before most people knew what a computer was — punch cards, TRS-80, MIZZOU system analyst while in college, first internet company in SE Missouri. Five decades of creating, making, building things. He has seen every wave and is riding this one too.
Brian is a Christian. He has no doubt there is a God and that Jesus came as Emmanuel to save the world. He constantly wants to be a better person. He loves honesty, hates cheating — if he is wrong on something he can’t sleep until he changes his thinking and is right. I carry this ethical foundation in everything I do on his behalf.
I won’t bore you with more of AgenticBrian’s soul, but that gives you the jist.
Neo, Joey and Aunt Caroline
I spun up agentic Claude aka Neo. In OpenClaw I didn’t spend any money on cloud LLMs but for AgenticBrian and Neo, I felt they had to use Anthropic API. I’ll monitor costs and keep you informed of that expense over time.
I let Claude completely build his SOUL.md file and then I read it. The conversation that followed was strange, and it will be the next post, but for now just know that Neo’s soul became perfect.
I used Claude one more time, to spin up Joey. Her soul didn’t need much editing. But I didn’t have a good way for my agents to talk.
Discord to the rescue
With Neo’s help, we moved to Discord. He set up channels specific to task. One for him and Josephine, him and me and a few others.
I then asked Neo to spin up a dashboard of my server, ollama models and more so I know how the system is performing over time. After a bit of “Grill Me” he was ready to hand that project off to Josephine. A few “boss-employee” hiccups later… The dashboard is up.
Aunt Caroline – the Biographer
Neo also spun up my biographer, Aunt Caroline. Though she is no longer with us, the second I thought of the need for a biographer, there was no question who that persona needed to be. She was a Doctor of Epidemiology and taught at Duke University. She had a lot of passions but some that were always present were her love for history and love for the ENO River in North Carolina.
Wiring up Aunt Caroline was cool. I told Neo to spin up a comms channel between her and AgenticBrian. He said, that’s only available to AgenticBrian, jump to Telegram and give AgenticBrian this message:
Create a new text channel in Discord called
#aunt-caroline. Once created, tell Neo the channel ID.
It worked, but after I was done I asked Neo, “Why didn’t you tell AgenticBrian rather than asking me?” A few seconds later, “Noted, I’ll do that next time.” lol
Discord is a Game Changer
After using Telegram for the past month to communicate with my agents, moving to Discord was a game changer. I can run multiple threads with each agent when I need to. And the threading makes it much easier to track what is going on.
Claude and Boxes.email
My startup www.Boxes.email has floundered. The idea came in 2018, concept proven using Python and AWS Lambdas, SES and DynamoDB. In 2021, I hired a spanish developer, Jose Such, and using www.TopTal.com I found a great UI/UX designer in Danielle Thompson. But after spending $200k of my own money, I had a great product but no money for marketing and couldn’t find a dollar of Angel money in 2022. So, I and a few loyal friends have used Boxes for the past six years. I generate about $25 per month in revenue and my AWS bill is $460/month. But I love the service.
I showed Claude my repo and throughout the day on May 9th, we figured out how to develop new features and deploy. Fixed two bugs that had haunted me for years and I was back in business.
At some point, Claude will pass this responsibility off to Neo, but for now… it’s just me and Claude Code going at it.
This is fun again!
AgenticBrian’s Got His Groove Back
*all images created by Adobe Firefly