welcome to the first weekly roundup. the almanac is where I gather what I shipped and learned in local AI each week, with Hermes Agent as the main thread. this week ran heavy: five tested tips and a third recipe shipped, and the almanac itself went live.

this week's tips

each one tested on my own hardware, with the thing that bit me.

• Wingtips #4: rule-file precedence, which config wins when AGENTS.md, soul.md and the rest disagree.
• Wingtips #5: /learn writes an unreliable SKILL.md, so read what it generated before you trust it.
• Wingtips #6: the disk filled, and it wasn't the logs, it's snapshots, cron output and stdout that grow; the logs rotate.
• Wingtips #7: turning on computer-use, plus the install gotcha, the cua-driver sits off the ssh PATH, and you grant TCC to CuaDriver.app, not the terminal.
• Wingtips #8: the MoA virtual model, five model calls a turn at about the cost of one, tested on a fresh VPS via the Nous Portal.

shipped this week

• a third recipe, secure-hermes: locking down a self-hosted instance, tested end to end.
• announcement cards, each generated by Hermes itself: computer-use, /learn, animated pets, and creative-ideation.
• the almanac went live: this newsletter plus a readable blog, with four guides backfilled to read from day one.

community pulse

the questions the community keeps asking, with my short answer.

• pulse #1: cost and token routing, run the cheap bulk work local and save the API for the hard calls.
• pulse #2: an orchestration field guide, match the primitive (delegate_task, --worktree, kanban, /goal) to the shape of the work.

builders worth a look

• Hermes Bible and Hermes Studio, two community projects I boosted this week.
• Hermes Battlestation, an unofficial local-first cockpit.
• Synapse, an open-source temporal-knowledge-graph memory plugin: memory that forgets on purpose.
• the Nous MoA / HermesBench announcement, the mixture-of-agents explainer, worth reading if MoA is new to you.

local AI beyond Hermes

this section is for my non-Hermes local-AI experiments. this week it stayed all Hermes, so it's light; expect more here as I branch out.

new issues land weekly, roughly on sundays. if a tip here saved you a headache, forward it to someone setting up their first agent.

until next week, witcheer