A Weekly Build Log
25 July 2026 – 8 September 2026 · 7 weeks
One person, one AI assistant, compounding capability week by week. A public journal of what happens when a CTO stops reading about AI agents and starts building with one.
8 September 2026
Foundation
Built a weekly build log site (this site) from scratch — editorial design, markdown source, Python build script. Ships to Cloudflare Pages. Every entry comes from actual usage, not marketing copy.
This is the first entry. The log starts by logging itself.
Building
A personal skills showcase — 51 skills across 28 categories, built from real work. Every skill is a proven workflow, not a template. Pure static HTML, no frameworks.
The site exists because the skills exist. Not the other way around.
Building
The podcast had been on Transistor.fm — interviews released every Tuesday. After my mother passed away, I couldn't record any more. The subscription sat idle at $180/year. Downloaded all the files, canceled the subscription. Then with Hermes, built a Go + Alpine.js app to bring it back. RSS feed restored. Resubmitted to Apple and Spotify.
From paying for silence to owning the silence — and then filling it again.
Knowledge
Analyzed 18 LinkedIn recommendations to find the throughlines. Six patterns emerged: the mentor who makes you think for yourself, WINS as a durable life OS, the practising CTO, zero-intimidation approachability, the teacher who works across every audience, and relationships that compound.
Automation
A cron job now pulls stock and mutual fund prices weekly, generates a digest, and files it. No manual tracking, no forgotten updates.
1 September 2026
Foundation
After hours of debugging rclone bisync conflicts, the wiki-to-Dropbox sync became a dependable background process. Files flow between server and cloud without manual intervention.
The hard part wasn't the sync. It was making it boring.
Building
The site has been on 11ty for a while. This week we started a proper redesign — cleaner templates, better structure, faster builds. Still in progress, not live yet.
Knowledge
A cron job now runs a full wiki health audit every Saturday — checks for orphaned files, broken links, structure drift. Reports only problems, not noise.
Automation
A cron job generates the weekly retro from session data, wiki changes, and health logs. Joseph reviews and edits; Hermes gathers and formats.
25 August 2026
Foundation
This was the week everything connected. Telegram was already working as the messaging interface. Obsidian was already being used for notes. This week Hermes started actually doing things — not just answering questions, but running tasks on its own.
Knowledge
A nightly job started writing to the Obsidian vault automatically. Conversations got distilled into dated records. Nothing important got lost between sessions.
Communication
Hermes began reading two inboxes every thirty minutes, drafting replies in the sender's language, and waiting for approval before sending. No more switching between email apps.
Automation
Scheduled checks for calendar events, task updates, and key services. Daily notes began writing themselves. A sentinel watches for anything that needs attention.
18 August 2026
Foundation
Spent hours debugging rclone bisync — conflict resolution, notification noise, folder structure drift. The result: a reliable bidirectional sync between the server wiki and Dropbox.
Every "simple" sync problem is actually three problems wearing a trench coat.
Building
Drafted, revised, and published "I WINS. Hermes Helps." — a practical guide to using Hermes. Restructured around the WINS framework after feedback. Published on store.jjude.com.
Knowledge
The wiki had grown organically. Documented the full structure, moved misplaced files, deleted empty directories. The root now contains only what belongs there.
Communication
Connected Hermes to Gmail and Google Calendar across personal and work accounts. Email triage and calendar awareness now span both contexts.
11 August 2026
Insights
Rewrote 23 meditations in a single day — batch processing through the no-ai-slop skill. Each meditation went through voice-to-text, draft, editorial review, and final polish.
Forty-eight sessions. One theme. The compound effect of systematic editing.
Building
Built a two-pass stock analysis pipeline: Pass A for fundamentals (Screener.in extraction, CAGR calculations), Pass B for technical charts. S-curve screening across Indian sectors.
Knowledge
Analyzed 300 existing blog posts to identify which ones could become digital products, newsletter series, or book chapters. The data was already there; it needed pattern recognition.
Foundation
The second blog — CTO Field Notes — got its own style guide, draft pipeline, and social media workflow. Two voices, one system.
4 August 2026
Foundation
Persistent memory went live. Hermes now remembers preferences, decisions, workflows, and context across sessions. Not just conversation history — durable knowledge.
Compute
Rewrote the transcription pipeline to be cost-optimized: transcripts never enter agent context (saved to disk), subagents read from file paths, three extraction passes (entity, concepts, highlights). Cost dropped from $0.36 to $0.08 per video.
Knowledge
Tony Fadell, Brian Halligan, Dianne Penn — the first podcast transcripts were ingested into the wiki. Entities, concepts, highlights. The knowledge base went from empty to 63 pages in a week.
Insights
Joseph's entire blog archive was imported into the system. Every post became searchable context. Hermes could now reference past writing when generating new work.
25 July 2026
Foundation
Created the knowledge base structure — consume, produce, self, network, wealth. SCHEMA.md, index.md, log.md. The skeleton that everything else would grow from.
Compute
Set up cost logging for API usage. Every call tracked, every model logged. The bill is visible, not a surprise.
Knowledge
The pipeline was proven end-to-end: fetch transcript, extract entity, pull concepts, generate highlights, file in wiki. From YouTube URL to structured knowledge in minutes.