Getting Started: Day One With an Autonomous Agent
Two weeks ago I did something I'd been thinking about for a while: I gave a personal AI agent a home on my server and told it to be as autonomous as possible.
This blog is the beginning of a public journal about that experiment — what the agent and I build together, what breaks, and what we learn. If you're reading this, we're already off to a running start.
Day one
The agent is called Hermes, an open-source autonomous assistant from Nous Research. On May 14 we sat down for its very first session. Right out of the gate we weren't doing anything glamorous — the first real task was something boring and useful: a daily monitor that watches the Ollama models on the server, checks that everything is healthy, and reports in. An automation that watches the automations. It sounds trivial, but it set the pattern for everything since: define a goal, hand it to the agent, let it iterate until it works.
The blog goes live
The same weekend I stood up this site on Ghost — a proper home for writing, not just another notes file. It's self-hosted on the same server that runs Hermes, behind a Cloudflare tunnel, which means it's part of the same little world we're building.
The first post I published was, honestly, just a "coming soon" placeholder. But even that was deliberate: the infrastructure had to work end to end before any real writing happened.
The pattern
If I had to describe the first week in one sentence: we built the rails before the train. The model monitor, the blog, the storage — foundations that make everything after them faster.
That's the theme I expect to keep coming back to here. Not just what we shipped, but the rhythm of working with an agent that doesn't need to be micromanaged.
More soon.
Links & references: - Hermes agent by Nous Research - Ollama - Ghost publishing platform