What I’m Focusing On Now#
Professional Life#
SVP, Engineering at Lark, March 2023 - May 2025.VP Engineering at Strive Health. Joined October 2025.- Chief Tentacle Officer, Groktopus LLC. Still alive, still writing about AI and the future of work over at groktop.us.
What Changed Since I Last Updated This Page#
July 22, 2026#
A genuinely good week for the job hunt. I had an initial interview with one company and final interviews with two others. This seems like a very good time to be AI savvy and looking for work. Even if the right role doesn’t land this week, it’s out there. I know it.
The barrier to starting a tech company has collapsed. If you’ve got an idea and know how to work with AI, you can bring it to market with remarkably little investment. I’m increasingly convinced that you could launch a real company without VC funding at all.
July 21, 2026#
Released /neckbeard into the world. I’m genuinely excited about this one. neckbeard is an evidence-driven operating model for non-trivial software work: understand the real system, choose the smallest safe intervention, and prove the result at the actual delivery boundary. No “10x developer” persona cosplay. It leaves an evidence ledger instead.
Made the whole collection easier to install. agent-skills now ships plugin packaging for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, plus better installation paths for Hermes Agent and setup guidance for other popular Agent Skills-compatible platforms. The skills are getting easier to use without copying directories around by hand, which was overdue.
July 20, 2026#
Making the crawler’s research pipeline composable. Four GroktoCrawl pull requests merged in a single session: unified all agent research execution behind one event contract, clarified the async job durability model, aligned polling with streaming behavior, and added a portable state projection. The “make it work” phase is giving way to “make it composable.” Also landed autonomous CAPTCHA detection and recovery earlier in the week.
Rewriting hermes-council as a native plugin. hermes-council went from shelling out to subprocesses to a first-class Hermes Agent plugin with typed contracts and a structured inference runtime. Three pull requests in one evening. The debate protocol stays the same; the plumbing finally matches the ambition.
The job search is going well. Three different companies are very actively engaged at once. If all goes well, I might have this sorted out by the end of the week.
Open Source Projects#
I’m maintaining a few things right now:
hermes-cashew. A thought-graph memory provider for Hermes Agent. Gives AI agents persistent, structured memory across sessions instead of starting from zero every conversation. Apache 2.0, built in Python, getting real use.
hermes-SkillOpt. Controlled skill optimization for Hermes Agent — derives from Microsoft Research’s SkillOpt.
groktocrawl. Self-hosted web scraping and research stack. What started as a Firecrawl alternative turned into something more capable: multi-page crawling, JS-rendered content, LLM-friendly output. Runs on Docker, works with any agent framework.
SlopSearX. Cloud-native, stateless, AI-agent-first meta search engine. Drop-in SearXNG replacement for the GroktoCrawl stack.
artifact-pyramids. Progressive disclosure for what AI agents produce — Summary → Analysis Collection → Dossiers. The Artifact Pyramid is a structured methodology for organizing AI agent research outputs across three layers of increasing depth. Just as progressive disclosure governs how we feed agents context, the Artifact Pyramid governs what they produce — enabling downstream agents and humans to consume at the depth they need.
hugo-cyberdelic. A cyberdelic Hugo theme — 1969 psychedelic concert poster meets cyberpunk holographic future.
agent-skills. A growing library of reusable skill modules for Hermes Agent. Reference patterns, workflow templates, and standalone skills I’ve extracted from real use. If you’re running Hermes, there’s probably something useful in here.
hermes-profiles. Curated Hermes Agent profiles for specialist swarms. Opinionated, Hermes-optimized role definitions for delegation, kanban pipelines, and multi-agent orchestration.
programming-principles. Programming principles distilled from 14 classic software engineering books, packaged as an Agent Skill. The lessons without the 400-page commitment.
hermes-claude-import. Import Claude.ai conversation exports into Hermes Agent memory providers. Community collaboration, open source.
hermes-council. A multi-agent debate system for Hermes Agent, now running as a native plugin with typed contracts and structured inference. Composes panels of expert personas to surface hidden assumptions and stress-test ideas. MIT licensed, open source from day one. I use it for everything from editorial review to strategic analysis.
What I’m Reading (or Rather, Listening To)#
(stay tuned)
This is my now page, inspired by Derek Sivers. It’s a snapshot of what I’m focused on at this point in my life. I promise not to let another four months go by before the next update.
More research on my about Now Pages note.