I’m running multiple, simultaneous unofficial experiments. Added all together, I certainly see the potential for a hapless coder finding himself at the bottom of a rabbit hole, drugged out and crying over and over, “But they KNOW ME!!!!!”
So before I tell you anything else:
Today is Saturday, May 23, 2026. My name is Brian Becker. And I know the difference between AI and Reality.
(Hi Brian)
Days 22–29: The Quiet Work
OK. Now I can tell you what happened.
For the last few weeks I’ve been building a small team of AI agents on Hermes. Each one has a carefully procured model, agent and soul files, its own area of focus. One agent drafts blog posts; One edits them; One creates the graphics; One publishes all of it to WordPress.
Days 22 through 29 were the part nobody blogs about — incremental fixes, dead ends, and configurations that almost worked. The handoffs between agents were still brittle. Progress was real, just not interesting enough to write about. That changes on Day 30.
Day 30: May 22 (Friday) — The Day It Worked
For most of those weeks the handoffs only worked when I stood in the middle. The editor would finish a draft but the publisher wouldn’t know it was ready. The publisher would have a question but the editor wouldn’t hear it. I was the message bus, copying things from one agent’s channel to another, mentioning the right name so the right agent would see the right thing.
Yesterday I dropped a 1,051-word draft into Aunt Caroline’s Discord channel with this prompt:
Caroline loaded her editing skill, located the files, read the post, ran each image through her vision tool, and generated a structured editorial report — critical issues, grammar notes, style observations, info-level questions for me to answer.
I answered her three open questions, but when I gave her the last answers, she did something I didn’t expect (but I should have since this is Hermes Agent): she wrote her own job description into a checklist. “Noted on the always-list — I’ll add ‘proof new blog post, add FEATURE IMAGE block, place inline images, write captions, prep Neo handoff’ as my standard checklist reminder so you don’t have to walk me through it each time.”
So that was cool, and then my jaw dropped.
She handed it to Neo with a clean production packet. I sat there, gobsmacked, staring at the message when the phrase “Neo is typing” showed up on my screen.
Six minutes later the post was live on the site as a draft, waiting for my final approval.
I made decisions in that whole sequence. I made a bunch of edits inside WordPress. They did everything else.
That’s the part I want to remember.
Not that AI is impressive — that part’s not news anymore. The part that’s news to me is that I built something small and it ran the way I’d hoped it would. Not perfectly. Well enough.
There’s a long way to go. But today? EUREKA!!!!!
More on what I’m doing:
- Meet my agentic team → — who Aunt Caroline, Neo, AgenticBrian, AgenticBen, and Josephine are, and what each one does
- The experiments I’m running → — five questions I’m trying to answer by building this
- What’s in a soul file → — how I write the documents that shape how my agents think