Finally, we get to share our content and our community the way it should be: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes

*** Disclaimer -- This Hermes + Cognee stacking talk is advanced, highly experimental mad-scientist $hit. My setups & ideas are garage tinkering — “duct-tape two beasts and see what explodes” energy. Not production gospel. Can break gloriously. Pearl of wisdom: Master Jake’s ICM method first. Nail prompt and context engineering before touching any of this. If your agent goes rogue, don’t come looking for me. *** ...now with that out of the way ;-) Hermes already ships one of the strongest native memory and learning loops you’ll find in any open-source agent. It doesn’t just “remember” — it actively extracts skills from every task, curates facts into clean memory files, builds procedural superpowers, and gets sharper at your workflow with every run. That’s not marketing fluff. It’s baked in and it works. So the question lands hard: if Hermes already learns over time, why the hell would anyone stack Cognee on top? Because they solve two completely different problems — and together they turn a sharp apprentice into something that feels superhuman. Hermes’ native memory is agent-first and ruthless about efficiency. It keeps context tight, avoids token bloat, runs self-improvement cycles, and turns one-off tasks into repeatable skills. It’s designed to make the agent better at acting for you, session after session, without needing a PhD in memory engineering. Perfect for most day-to-day work. Cognee is a full knowledge engine. It’s built for the stuff Hermes intentionally stays light on: ingesting messy data at scale, structuring it into graphs and ontologies, spotting hidden connections across projects, resolving contradictions, and creating a stable, semantic long-term substrate that multiple agents or tools can actually share. One is the brain that learns by doing. The other is the encyclopedic library that never forgets context and connects dots you didn’t even know existed. They don’t fight. They layer. Hermes recently added clean modular memory providers. That means you can plug Cognee in as the heavyweight backend for deep graph recall and cross-session intelligence while keeping Hermes’ native layers (prompt memory, skill curation, fast SQLite search) for speed and autonomy. No messy overlap. No retrieval wars. Just smarter routing.

Consider this a thank you @Jake Van Clief for the inspiration and giving us the mindset and tools to grow our businesses. ***Disclaimer: this is an advanced setup. DONOT use until you're fully comfortable with Jake's method*** =============================== Many of us eventually hit the limit with basic chat interfaces. The agent forgets context between sessions, data security starts to feel risky, and the setup creates more friction than value. This stack addresses those issues directly It combines Hermes Agent with Cognee as the memory engine, hosted on a simple DigitalOcean Droplet and secured through Cloudflare Tunnel. The entire deployment follows Jake Van Clief’s Interpretable Context Methodology for clean, repeatable orchestration. The result is a private, self-improving AI agent that grows more capable over time while keeping your data and server fully under your control. The components stay minimal and transparent: Hermes Agent as the autonomous gateway, Cognee for structured relational memory, and Cloudflare Tunnel for secure outbound-only access. You deploy once using the ICM workflow, then the system handles the repetitive memory management and self-improvement loops. The agent becomes a genuine thinking partner instead of a one-off responder. That frees up your attention for the judgment and creative work only you can do. If you are running a self-hosted agent setup or exploring similar private stacks, I would like to hear what you are using and what friction you have solved. Drop your thoughts below.

I feel the FOMO when I dig into posts from different forums and come across something buried a few pages deep from a week or more ago which was the answer I needed earlier. I never used Skool.com prior-to Clief Notes. Is there a way to track conversations - list 'hot topics' regardless of forum... maybe a newsletter format (1x/week) which highlights discussion topics which are relevant? Short of building a bot or agent to run through the site for topics of interest (I considered it, but didn't want to burn the tokens), I feel there's a better way but frankly don't have the brain bandwidth to attack the issue at the moment - so I ask the great groupmind of awesome, how could we do this better?

We've been hoarding links like digital pack rats -- and it's time to crack the vault open. Jake and I put together a running list of the tools, resources, and random goldmines we keep coming back to. The stuff that actually stuck after the hype wore off. If it survived our workflows, it earned a spot here. https://www.skool.com/quantum-quill-lyceum-1116/classroom/c7f102c7?md=59285d6b92ed425cae7f439761e26acf ------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT THIS IS Think of it as a curated toolbox -- not a "Top 100 AI Tools" listicle from some SEO farm. These are things we've actually used, broken, duct-taped back together, and kept reaching for. Some are well-known, some are buried gems we stumbled on at 2am while chasing a rabbit hole. WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU This page is alive. It's not a monument -- it's a workbench. - Drop a comment if something on here saved you hours (or cost you hours -- we want to know that too) - Suggest additions -- what's in YOUR toolchest that we're sleeping on? - Call us out -- if something's outdated, broken, or just not as good as the alternative you found, tell us - Share your use case -- same tool hits different in different hands. How are you actually using these? We'll keep updating this as the collective stack evolves. Your feedback shapes what stays, what goes, and what gets added next. ------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer: You know the drill -- this is garage tinkering, not production gospel. Your mileage may vary. Duct-tape what works and break what doesn't. Let's keep building brains that can't be taken away from us.