A live update
on work and life.

I've been replacing Hermes-Agent with a new assistant built on Claude's Agent SDK. The trigger was a simple skill, turning on a meeting light, where the local Qwen model made 65 tool calls and never ran the command. In the new setup Claude orchestrates and a small local model handles a narrow private lane. The boundary between them is enforced by separate unix users, not by prompt instructions. The first thing I measured was context cost. Five tool servers added 83.5K tokens to every session, and one of them accounted for about 65K. I deferred that one, which brought a session down to roughly 21K.

Most of the bugs came from the glue. After I changed a tool's schema, the assistant kept insisting it couldn't message group chats. Its resumed session still held its old beliefs, and only a fresh session fixed it. Group sends then turned up two SMS threads with identical members, so the resolver now keeps whichever was active most recently. I also found that an approved send was marked "sent" even when the tool had reported failure. Failures now get marked, explained, and followed up on.

The private lane runs through Switchboard, which shares one Tesla P100 across several models. I tested smaller models against the 35B mixture-of-experts model, which was spilling experts into system RAM. A 12B Gemma at Q8 scored 36 of 36 on twelve cases run three times each, and it fits entirely on the GPU. Its vision pass missed a running ceiling fan until I raised the image token budget. A larger image chunk then crashed the server until I raised the batch size to match.

On a D&D campaign app I maintain, I changed who sees which characters. Players now see their own character and the party's other PCs, and NPCs only when the DM shares them in full. Widening the roster this way would have exposed other players' deleted characters in the trash view, so that view stays own-only for players, with a test covering it. Separately, every dropdown in the app was showing raw IDs instead of labels. I fixed about 25 of them and added a lint rule so a new one can't ship without labels.