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Bluetooth may seem the obvious next step in the remote's evolution, but there are reasons that infrared hasn't died out.

If you're a .NET developer looking to break into AI engineering, agents are the single best place to start. They're the point where "calling an LLM API" turns into "building a system that reasons, uses tools, and takes action" — and Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, paired with .NET, makes this surprisingly approachable. In this post, I'll walk through exactly how to stand up your first agent end-to-end — from the Azure side setup to the actual C# code — and share the full walkthrough in video form as well. 🎥 Watch the full hands-on video here: https://youtu.be/mrsEsculrNg Why Agents, and Why Now Most of us started our AI journey with a simple chat completion call — send a prompt, get text back. That's fine for Q&A, but it falls apart the moment you need the model to do something: run code, search documents, call an API, or hold a multi-turn conversation with real state. That's exactly the gap Foundry Agent Service closes. An agent in Foundry is: Durable — it lives as a resource in your Foundry project, not in your app's memory Tool-aware — it can invoke built-in tools (like a code interpreter) or your own custom functions Stateful — conversations persist and carry context across turns And the best part for us .NET folks: the entire thing is callable from clean, typed C# — no wrestling with raw REST payloads. What You'll Need Before writing any code, set up the Azure side: An Azure AI Foundry project with a chat model deployed (e.g., gpt-4o-mini ) The Foundry User RBAC role assigned to your account at the resource/resource-group scope — this is the single most common blocker people hit (a silent 403 when calling the SDK), so don't skip it az login run locally, so your code can authenticate without hardcoding any keys If you've worked with Cognitive Services roles before, note that agent management needs this separate Foundry-specific role — that trips up a lot of people coming from plain Azure OpenAI usage. Setting Up the .NET Project dotnet new console -n FoundryAgen

In 2017, I bought an old Magnus chord organ off Craigslist for $10. It's one of my favorite music gear purchases. Electric chord organs let you play full chords with just a press of a button, making them perfect for aspiring singer-songwriters or fooling around at home. But chord organs largely fell out of favor […]

"Everybody knows the Greeks are inside."

Current AI, a non-profit building AI that leaves no one culture behind, has made remarkable progress across devices, AI chat and more.

Jurig (Sundanese: ghost ) — an autonomous AI agent that haunts your binaries. .-. ██ ██ ██ ██████ ██ ██████ (o o) ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ | u | ██ ██ ██ ██████ ██ ██ ███ | | ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ '~-~' █████ ██████ ██ ██ ██ ██████ autonomous reverse-engineering agent · android · binary · frida Point it at an APK, XAPK, or native binary and it plans, decompiles, searches, hooks, captures traffic, and writes you a report — by itself. In one live run it took a real Android loan app, auto-extracted the XAPK, decompiled 13,367 classes , grepped the sources, and surfaced a hardcoded AES key with a zero IV plus the full API endpoint map — then asked me whether it should go dynamic with Frida. This post is the build story: the architecture, the design bets, and the three bugs that genuinely fought back. Repo: https://github.com/ReverserID/JURIG Why build another agent? Existing "AI reverse engineering" is mostly a pile of MCP servers you wire into a chat client. That's fine, but I wanted something opinionated: Autonomous , not chat — it drives a real toolchain end to end. A single portable binary — no Python venv soup, no MCP daemons. Multi-model — my Claude subscription, OpenRouter, local Ollama, Kimi, Qwen. A TUI that feels like a hacker tool , not a log dump. So: Go. Charmbracelet for the TUI (Bubble Tea + Lipgloss + Glamour). And a hard rule — no MCP . Every capability is a native Go function that shells out to a portable RE binary, or does the work in pure Go. Architecture ┌─ agent loop ─┐ plan → ask scope → recon → locate → dynamic → report │ │ │ LLM router │ anthropic · openai-compat (openrouter/ollama/kimi/qwen) · claude-cli │ │ │ 25+ tools │ jadx · apktool · radare2 · ghidra · frida · adb · proxy │ │ + secret_scan · url_extract · manifest · elf/pe_info · search_code │ │ │ TUI │ animated ghost header · code cards · model picker · NET panel └──────────────┘ One wire format, many providers The whole thing speaks the Anthropic Messages protocol internally. A router a

I don’t log in to my LinkedIn account anymore, haven’t done so in years. “AI first this, AI driven that,” alright, alright, I get it! You guys absolutely love AI, and I can’t stand the fact that after almost 5(!!!) years, people still talk about it like it’s the best thing since chicken nuggets. Back when LLMs have started showing somewhat positive results when it came to generating less-than-average code, I came to a devastating conclusion: My friends and colleagues might not actually enjoy coding at all. Maybe they just didn’t enjoy coding the way I do—but either way, I was extremely sad and actively burnt out to find that everybody around me jumped on the prompting bandwagon without giving it much of a critical second thought. I could argue that it was partially because of their employers, but it was definitely because they chose and wanted to. They pressed me “It’s the future, aob2f, we don’t need to write code anymore.” “I just tell Claude to do it, and it’s done.” “I don’t write a single line of code anymore, don’t be left behind.” Some even outrageously claimed “Yeah I reviewed Claude’s 40k lines PR in two days, it was good.” I was baffled. Was I in this sick, absent-minded Truman show spinoff? Were these the same smart, even genius individuals that have built and driven the world’s innovation in the past 30 years with their own hands and minds? It got to a point where I started doubting myself. Maybe it’s really that good? I genuinely gave it a thought. Eventually, I reluctantly gave in and tried vibe coding for the first time… You see, up until then I exclusively used AI as a sophisticated search engine. I asked a technical question—got an answer. More than 50% of the times it was inaccurate or a full-on hallucination, and then I validated the result through trial and error. Admittedly it was better than blindly googling niche bugs and finding nothing but a lonely and vague question from 8 years ago on Stack Overflow. But matter of fact—vibe coding was a mi

A few weeks back I picked up google-gemini/gemini-cli issue #28090: the shell tool was forwarding a command's entire stdout/stderr straight into the model's context, with no cap unless you opted into an LLM-based summarization step. Run one noisy build command and you'd hand the model tens of thousands of tokens of log spam it never asked for. The fix sounded trivial: cap the output before it goes into llmContent . I had a one-liner in my head before I'd even opened the file. That one-liner is exactly the kind of "obviously correct" fix that ships bugs. The one-liner The naive version looks like this: const MAX = 32 * 1024 ; // 32 KiB function truncate ( output ) { if ( output . length <= MAX ) return output ; return output . slice ( 0 , MAX ) + ' \n ...[truncated]... \n ' + output . slice ( - MAX ); } It compiles. It passes a quick manual test with a big ASCII log file. It looks done. I almost committed it as-is before writing the actual test suite. The problem is what .slice() is slicing. JavaScript strings are sequences of UTF-16 code units, not bytes and not Unicode codepoints. Most characters in typical shell output (letters, digits, punctuation) are one code unit each, so .slice() looks safe in casual testing. But the moment real-world command output contains anything outside the Basic Multilingual Plane — an emoji in a commit message, certain box-drawing/progress-bar characters some CLIs use, non-Latin filenames — that character is represented as a surrogate pair : two 16-bit code units that only mean something together. Slice between them and you don't get an error. You get one dangling unpaired surrogate on each side of the cut, silently baked into the string that gets sent to the model. No exception. No lint warning. JSON.stringify on the payload can even throw later, in a completely unrelated part of the request pipeline, for a reason that has nothing to do with where the bug actually is. Or worse: it doesn't throw, and the model just receives a slightly

Part of a series on building cz-agents → under the hood. Where we left off In June, I compared the three camps of agentic payments here—x402, card tokens, and banks—and argued that x402 will take machine-to-machine micropayments, while cards and banks split the rest. I won't repeat the basics of the protocol, how the 402 status code works, or why cards don't add up economically on tiny amounts; anyone who needs a refresher will find it in that article. This piece is about something else. A few weeks have passed; the numbers and the big-player backing have both jumped by an order of magnitude, and for the first time, I can compare those figures against what I actually see in my own logs. The gap between the two is the entire point of what follows. The numbers are hard to miss I'll start with what speaks for x402, because that's the more honest approach. According to aggregate Chainalysis data, the protocol has processed over 169 million payments so far, between roughly 590,000 buyers and 100,000 sellers. That's no longer a conference demo. More interesting than the volume is the structural shift. The share of transactions above one dollar rose from 49% in early 2025 to roughly 95% in early 2026. In other words: x402 is ceasing to be a toy for micro-cents and is starting to handle amounts that actually show up on the books. Anyone who wrote the protocol off as a curiosity for paying fractions of a cent per API query is looking at an old snapshot. Above all, a lineup has assembled that is hard to dismiss as crypto-bubble enthusiasts: Stripe launched x402 support on February 10, 2026, in the preview of its Machine Payments product (USDC on the Base network). Ripple added native x402 to the XRP Ledger on June 21, 2026. AWS built x402 into Bedrock AgentCore Payments—together with Coinbase and Stripe—and also lets you monetize agent traffic on CloudFront and WAF. Sites behind Amazon's edge can charge agents right at the edge, without touching their core application. Google

Most portfolios have a boring "About Me" paragraph. I replaced mine with something you can talk to — an AI terminal that answers questions about me, pulls my live GitHub activity, and remembers the conversation. You can try it right now on my portfolio: rehbarkhan.in . I'm Rehbar Khan , a Full Stack & Gen-AI developer, and in this post I'll break down exactly how it works — the RAG pipeline, the LangGraph agent, the memory layer, and how I wired in real GitHub data with MCP. No fluff, just the architecture. The problem I wanted a portfolio assistant that could: Answer questions about my background accurately — no hallucinated jobs or fake projects. Fetch live data (my latest GitHub activity), not a stale snapshot. Remember the conversation across messages. Stream responses token-by-token like a real terminal. That rules out "just prompt an LLM." You need retrieval for grounding, tools for live data, and state for memory. Here's the stack I landed on. Architecture at a glance Next.js 16 chat UI ──► FastAPI (streaming) ──► LangGraph agent ├── RAG retriever → pgvector (Neon Postgres) ├── GitHub MCP tool → live GitHub data └── Redis checkpointer → conversation memory Frontend: Next.js 16 (App Router, TypeScript) — a streaming terminal UI. Backend: FastAPI with streaming responses. Orchestration: LangGraph ( StateGraph , ToolNode , tools_condition ). LLM: OpenAI gpt-4o-mini . Retrieval: text-embedding-3-small → pgvector on Neon Postgres. Memory: Redis checkpointer for per-session history. Live data: GitHub via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) . 1. The RAG pipeline Everything the bot knows about me lives in a single reference.txt . I chunk it, embed it, and store it in Postgres with pgvector: from langchain_text_splitters import RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter from langchain_openai import OpenAIEmbeddings from langchain_postgres import PGVector splitter = RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter ( chunk_size = 500 , chunk_overlap = 80 ) chunks = splitter . split_text ( open ( " refe

I Built an Open-Source Lab to Learn the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications Over the past few months, I've been exploring the security challenges around Large Language Models. While there are plenty of articles explaining prompt injection, system prompt leakage, insecure tool usage, and other LLM vulnerabilities, I kept asking myself one question: Where can someone actually practice exploiting these vulnerabilities? That's what led me to build LLMVault . LLMVault is an open-source, intentionally vulnerable platform that helps developers and security professionals learn the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications (2025) through hands-on labs instead of theory. Each lab simulates a vulnerable AI application inspired by real-world LLM attack scenarios. Instead of reading about prompt injection, you'll exploit it yourself, capture flags, understand why it worked, and then review the recommended mitigation. The objective is to bridge the gap between theory and practical AI security. Why I built LLMVault When learning web security, platforms like DVWA, WebGoat, and Juice Shop made learning practical. For AI security, I couldn't find a similar project that was: Open source Self-hosted Free to use Designed around the OWASP LLM Top 10 Built as a hands-on learning environment So I decided to build one. What is LLMVault? LLMVault is a deliberately vulnerable AI application where every challenge demonstrates a real-world LLM security issue. Instead of simply reading about prompt injection or system prompt leakage, you exploit vulnerable AI assistants, capture flags, and learn why the attack works. Each challenge also includes defensive guidance so you understand how to prevent the same issue in production. Features 🛡️ OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications (2025) 💥 CTF-style challenges 🔍 Realistic AI attack scenarios 📚 Defensive explanations 🐳 Docker support 🔑 No API keys required 💻 Fully offline 🧩 Extensible challenge framework Getting Started Clone the repository: git clone https://github

🚀 AI is becoming smarter every day. But intelligence alone isn't enough—it also needs a standardized way to communicate with tools, applications, and data. That's exactly what Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides. 🚀 Introduction The AI landscape has evolved rapidly over the past few years. We've moved from simple chatbots to: 🤖 AI coding assistants ⚙️ Autonomous agents ☁️ Cloud automation 📊 Infrastructure monitoring 🔄 Intelligent workflows But one major challenge still exists: How can AI securely communicate with external tools like GitHub, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Slack, databases, and local files? Until recently, every AI company built custom integrations. That meant: duplicated engineering effort inconsistent APIs difficult maintenance poor interoperability To solve this problem, the AI ecosystem is adopting a new open standard called Model Context Protocol (MCP). 🤔 What is Model Context Protocol (MCP)? Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol that standardizes how AI models communicate with external tools, APIs, databases, applications, and services. Instead of every AI assistant creating custom integrations for every service, MCP provides one common language. Think of MCP as: 🔌 USB-C for AI applications. Just as USB-C lets different devices communicate using one standard, MCP allows different AI assistants to connect to external systems in a consistent way. ❌ The Problem Before MCP Imagine you're building an AI DevOps assistant. It needs access to: GitHub Docker Kubernetes AWS Terraform Jenkins Prometheus Grafana Local Files Internal Documentation Without MCP, you'd need to: Learn every API separately Build authentication repeatedly Maintain multiple SDKs Handle different response formats Continuously update integrations Every AI application repeats the same engineering work. This approach is: ❌ Time-consuming ❌ Expensive ❌ Difficult to maintain ❌ Hard to scale ✅ How MCP Solves This Problem MCP introduces a standardized communication layer between AI m

A salamander can lose a leg and grow a new one. Cut a zebrafish's fin and it simply builds another. Mammals, us included, got the consolation prize: a scar. For a century, biologists assumed that somewhere on the evolutionary road to becoming warm-blooded, fast-moving animals, we traded regeneration away for good. Two research teams working on opposite sides of the planet have just made that assumption look wrong. The headline is almost hard to believe: the ability to regrow lost body parts may not have been deleted from our biology at all. It may simply have been switched off, and switches can be flipped back on. The genetic "remote control" that stopped working The first clue comes from a team at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, working with genomics powerhouse BGI-Research. Publishing in Science , they zeroed in on a gene called ALDH1A2 , the instruction sheet for an enzyme that turns vitamin A into retinoic acid, a molecule that acts like a foreman on a construction site, telling cells where to go and what to build during tissue repair. Animals that regenerate freely crank this gene up at the wound site. Mice, it turns out, still carry the same gene. They've just lost the genetic "remote controls," the regulatory DNA that tells the gene to fire after an injury. The hardware is intact; the software command was disconnected somewhere in evolution. So the researchers reconnected it. By reactivating that dormant switch and restoring the flow of retinoic acid, they got mice to regenerate damaged outer-ear tissue, something a normal mouse simply cannot do. In their own words, they had found "a genetic switch involved in the evolution of regeneration." Meanwhile, in Texas, they regrew a limb joint The second piece of evidence lands the point with force. At Texas A&M, a group led by Dr. Ken Muneoka took a different route to the same destination. Instead of editing a genetic switch, they used a precisely timed sequence of two signaling proteins.

Google's AlphaEvolve reached general availability on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, turning the DeepMind research project into an evolutionary code optimization service. Evaluators run client-side so code never leaves the customer's infrastructure. Klarna doubled ML training throughput; practitioners note it only works where a measurable evaluation function exists. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Written by Marlowe Finch, archival bloodhound at Bitcoin Institute. Bitcoin has been decentralized and trustless since block zero. No CEO, no committee, no kill switch, no single person who can rewrite the rules. That's the pitch. It's why the whitepaper still gets quoted like scripture. Block 74638 does not agree with the pitch. What actually shipped in that block On August 15, 2010, a transaction landed in the Bitcoin blockchain with two outputs. Each one paid out 92,233,720,368.54277039 BTC . Combined: over 184 billion BTC — roughly nine thousand times the 21 million BTC that will ever exist, created in a single transaction. The validation code, CheckTransaction() , checked that each individual output was non-negative. It never checked whether the sum of the outputs overflowed. Two values chosen just under INT64_MAX, added together, wrapped around to a negative number in signed 64-bit arithmetic. A 0.5 BTC input, compared against that negative sum, satisfied the "input covers output" check. The transaction validated. The block got mined. Every rule the network was running said this was fine. That's CVE-2010-5139. It is also, by any dollar value you want to apply, the most expensive missing bounds-check ever shipped to production. So who hand-builds a transaction engineered to overflow a signed 64-bit integer, and what does a currency with a hard 21-million-coin cap do when someone mints nine thousand times that in one block? The archive's full account of the incident lays it out block by block . The receipts 18:08 UTC, August 15 — Jeff Garzik opens a BitcoinTalk thread titled "Strange block 74638", pastes the raw block dump, and closes with one question: "92233720368.54277039 BTC? Is that UINT64_MAX, I wonder?" 20:38 UTC — Satoshi Nakamoto, to the bitcoin-list mailing list, network-wide: "*** WARNING *** We are investigating a problem. DO NOT TRUST ANY TRANSACTIONS THAT HAPPENED AFTER 15.08.2010 17:05 UTC (block 74638) until the issue is resolved." 20:39 UTC — Ga

Over the past few months I’ve been building Radar, an open-source media intelligence and social listening platform that anyone can self-host. The project started with a simple observation: most media monitoring platforms are incredibly powerful—but they’re also expensive, closed, and often lock users into proprietary AI services. I wanted to explore a different approach. What is Radar? Radar is a self-hostable platform for monitoring news and public media sources using AI. Instead of relying on proprietary datasets, it works with free public RSS and Atom feeds, allowing anyone to build their own monitoring environment. One of the core design decisions is that Radar is AI-agnostic. Rather than forcing a single provider, you can choose between: Anthropic Claude OpenAI Grok Current Features 📰 News aggregation from free RSS and Atom feeds 🤖 AI-powered summaries 😊 Sentiment analysis 🔍 Keyword and topic monitoring 📊 Searchable dashboard 🏠 Self-hosted deployment 🔓 Fully open source Why Build Another Media Intelligence Tool? Enterprise platforms such as Talkwalker and Brandwatch are excellent products, but they aren’t accessible to everyone. Radar is aimed at: developers startups journalists researchers agencies open-source enthusiasts The goal isn’t to replicate every enterprise feature, but to build a transparent, extensible, and self-hosted alternative that anyone can inspect, modify, and improve. Looking for Feedback The project is still under active development, and I’d really appreciate feedback on: architecture user experience deployment scalability AI abstraction features that would make the platform more useful If you’re interested in open-source AI, media monitoring, or self-hosted software, I’d love to hear your thoughts. GitHub Demo Contributions, suggestions, feature requests, and bug reports are all welcome.

Stack Overflow's question volume has been falling since ChatGPT went public in November 2022 ( OpenAI ). The site that trained a generation of developers, and most of the AI tools those developers now use, is slowly emptying out. In October 2023, Stack Overflow laid off 28% of its staff ( Stack Overflow Blog ). CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar framed it as a restructuring toward profitability. Everyone in the industry understood the real cause. Traffic was down. The thing causing it was sitting in every developer's browser tab. This is not another "AI killed Stack Overflow" piece. That take is everywhere and it misses the actual problem. The interesting part is the feedback loop, and it points somewhere uncomfortable for the AI industry itself. The conventional story, and what it misses The popular version goes like this. Developers used to paste error messages into Google and land on a Stack Overflow thread. Now they paste the same error into ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot and get a direct answer. Why click through to a forum, risk a condescending comment, and wait for a human when a model answers in two seconds? That part is true. It explains the traffic drop. It does not explain why the people building the AI should be worried. The seed corn problem Here is the part most coverage skips. Every large language model trained on internet text consumed a huge amount of Stack Overflow. The site's archive of voted, edited, human-reviewed answers is one of the highest-quality programming datasets in existence. It is the reason an AI can answer your Python error at all. Now run the loop forward. AI tools answer questions directly. Developers stop posting on Stack Overflow. The archive stops growing. The next round of models trains on a corpus that is increasingly old, increasingly stale, and missing everything that happened after 2022. When you train an AI on data generated by another AI, quality degrades. Researchers proved this formally. Shumailov and colleagues showed that model

I watched an AI agent send 200 emails to the wrong recipients because I forgot one validation check. The emails were well written. The offers were real. The recipients were just... not our leads. That was early. I learned fast. Every agent I build now has three layers of guardrails before it touches a database or an API. Here's exactly what those layers look like and why they're non-negotiable for production. Input Validation: Your Prompt Is Not a Schema The first mistake people make is trusting the LLM to produce valid output. It won't. Not reliably. I've seen GPT-4 return a JSON key called "emial" instead of "email" in a critical pipeline. One typo, and the whole record is garbage. The fix is a strict validation layer that runs before any data reaches your system. In my AI resume tailor, I use a JSON schema with conditional presence flags. Every field that must be real has a has_* boolean guard. If the LLM tries to fabricate a phone number, the schema rejects it. const resumeSchema = z . object ({ contact : z . object ({ email : z . string (). email (), phone : z . string (). optional (), has_phone : z . boolean () }). refine ( data => { // If phone is present, the guard must be true return data . phone ? data . has_phone : ! data . has_phone }, " Phone number present but has_phone flag is false " ) }) This pattern catches hallucinations before they corrupt your database. The schema is the contract. The LLM is just a suggestion engine. Permission Scoping: Give Agents the Minimum They Need An agent should never have write access to tables it doesn't need. That sounds obvious, but I've seen production systems where a job description rewriting agent had full CRUD access to the user table. When I built the LLM scoring pipeline for a job board platform, I created separate database roles. The scoring agent only had SELECT on the job listings table and INSERT on a scoring results table. It never touched users, applications, or configuration. Even if the prompt was hijack

Originally published on hexisteme notes . I write these engineering notes with one main model, and until recently I also reviewed them with that same model. Same family writes, same family checks its own work. That sounded fine right up until I had ten queued posts sitting in a publish backlog and a nagging thought: if the writer and the reviewer come from the same training distribution, what exactly is the review checking for? So I ran an experiment. I took the queue and had a different vendor's model audit it before anything went out — not to replace my own review, but to see what a genuinely different set of weights would flag that mine hadn't. The setup: copies only, and a self-verifying prompt The mechanics were deliberately boring. I copied the ten queued articles into a scratchpad directory and exposed only that copy to the auditor via --add-dir — the auditor never got write access to the originals, so nothing it did could touch the source of truth by accident. The audit itself ran as agy --model gemini-3.1-pro-high , pointed at the copy directory, with one instruction: find technical factual errors, broken sentences, cross-article inconsistencies, unsupported claims, and tone violations, and verify each one yourself on the web before reporting it. I wanted a model that would check its own homework, not just pattern-match on "this looks wrong." It came back with seven findings. Rule one: don't trust the auditor either Seven findings from a different vendor is not the same thing as seven confirmed bugs. I re-verified every single one independently — grepping the original text, checking official documentation, and where possible checking against a real machine — before touching anything. Of the seven, six held up and got fixed. One didn't: the auditor flagged a sentence as an error, and when I went back to the primary source, it turned out to be the auditor misreading a perfectly correct sentence, not a defect in the writing. Without the re-verification step, I

When I first wrote about NutriAgent in November 2025, it was a full application. It had a Python backend, a web interface, a Telegram bot, user accounts, Google OAuth, Supabase, and a Google Sheets integration. Recently, I reproduced its core workflow as a skill for my personal AI agent. It took around 15 minutes and two prompts. I didn't build another backend, deploy a service, or implement OAuth again. I explained how I wanted the workflow to behave, tested it, and watched a new row appear in my nutrition spreadsheet. The original application wasn't a mistake. It was how I could deliver that experience with the tools available at the time. Eight months later, the starting point had changed. Eight Months Ago, This Was an App I built NutriAgent because I wanted to track calories and protein without trapping my data inside a nutrition app. I wanted the raw records in a spreadsheet I controlled, where I could create my own reports and eventually connect nutrition with my training data. The first version was a personal n8n workflow. It worked for me, but when a friend wanted to try it, I realized that everything was tied to my accounts. To make it reusable, I rebuilt it in Python and added the parts a real multi-user product needed: authentication, storage, a web interface, Telegram, Google OAuth, conversation history, and account linking. I've already told that story in I Ditched MyFitnessPal and Built an AI Agent to Track My Food , and later wrote about what broke after I used it every day for a month . This article starts after that version. My Gaming PC Became an Agent Box I had a modest gaming PC at home with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB drive. Using it through Windows, WSL, and remote desktop from my Mac felt awkward, so I installed Linux and turned it into a remote box for running agents. I'll write about that setup separately. I moved Hermes there from a VPS. Hermes is the personal agent I now run on that machine. It can load reusable skills and use tools connected