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.

💰 $325 CASH PRIZE 💰 That's a full year of Premium. Win this and your membership pays for itself. 📋 THE CHALLENGE You just got hired again. Different client this time. Meet Sarah, a freelance copywriter who's drowning in context-switching. 📎 Download the full client brief attached to this post. Short version: She works with three types of clients (SaaS founders, ecommerce brands, local service businesses) and starts from scratch every project. She doesn't need another tool. She needs a system. Your job is to build her a folder-based AI specialist she can drop into any Claude project. The folder IS the deliverable. 🗂️ THIS WEEK YOU LEARN ICM Up until now, comps have been "build a thing." This week you utilize the methodology taught throughout the community. 🧠 Folders as architecture. That's it. That's the whole concept this week. Your specialist is a folder with five things: - 📄 identity.md (who they are) - 📐 rules.md (how they respond) - 💬 examples.md (what good looks like) - 📚 reference/ (source material) - 📖 README.md (how to use it) Drop the folder into a Claude project. Claude becomes the specialist. Reusable. Shareable. Portable. 🎯 PICK YOUR SPECIALIST Don't pick copywriting. That's Sarah's example. Pick something YOU would actually use. A few sparks to get you thinking: - A salary negotiation coach - A meal planner that knows your dietary restrictions - A code reviewer for your stack - A real estate market analyst for your city - A technical recruiter screener - A grant writer for nonprofits in your space The more specific, the better. "Marketing expert" is not a specialist. "B2B email expert for enterprise SaaS targeting CFOs" is. 💼 WHY THIS ONE LANDS ON YOUR RESUME Real talk. Winning a comp in a Skool community doesn't get you a job by itself. But shipping a working folder-based AI specialist with a clean README and a public repo? That's a portfolio piece.

Between an ERP and a folder system with tools and an LLM attached? What’s the difference?

So if I understand correctly, the Hermes agent is the Claude agent that I’m talking to in VS Code. So….. for business owners… a self governing business is the holy grail of what we’re doing here, right? A self governing company starts at VS Code and gets built brick by brick, and that’s what’s happening right now? That’s what we’re doing? And in like 6-12 months we’ll have amassed enough data and infrastructure to support that? Am I getting it?

came back after a week offline and spent an hour just reading posts. people are shipping. full agent teams, named specialists, live clients. and i'm still on the foundation. but here's the honest version of what's actually happening. i build something. it works. then i look at it and realise it's not what i actually wanted. so i break it and start again. then halfway through the rebuild, a new idea comes in and now i don't know if i should finish what i started or pivot to the thing that's clearly better. i've rebuilt the same system three times in a month. and the worst part.. each version was better than the last. so was the rebuilding wrong? or is that just what building actually looks like before it locks in? genuinely asking because i can't tell if this is a me problem or if everyone here is quietly doing the same thing and just posting the final version.