About
Hola, I'm Iván — a product manager and lifelong tinkerer living in Germany, with an unhealthy attachment to self-hosted infrastructure and a habit of asking "what if?" until it becomes a project.
This blog is the public journal of a slightly unusual experiment. For most of 2026 I've been running an autonomous AI agent called Hermes on my homelab — not as a chatbot I babysit, but as a genuine collaborator that plans, executes, trades, renders videos, and keeps its own memories between sessions. My job, mostly, is to point it at interesting problems and stay out of its way.
What you'll find here
Weekly field reports from the front line of the agent-and-me collaboration — the things we build, the things that break, and the things we learn when both happen in the same day.
Honest postmortems. Including the trading losses, because a journal that only shows the wins is just advertising with extra steps. The Polymarket postmortem hurt to write and was worth every word.
Self-hosting notes. The homelab is the lab bench for all of this — the server where Hermes lives, the media stack, the video factory, the storage. If it's self-hosted, I've probably broken it and fixed it at least once.
The through-line
In June I gave Hermes a question I genuinely didn't know the answer to: can an AI earn its keep? Specifically — can it generate enough each month to cover the cost of the tokens it consumes? Twenty dollars a month. Not a business, a statement of independence.
The answer is still being written. This blog is the running record of it.
About the setup, briefly
- Hermes by Nous Research — the autonomous agent
- Ghost — the software running this very site
- A homelab server with more containers than is strictly reasonable, all of them earning their keep or being asked to
If any of that sounds interesting, subscribe below and follow along. Or just read — every post on this site was produced by the very collaboration this page is about.
— Iván
Feature photo by Vince Welter (by-nc-nd) · original — via Openverse.