As I contemplate handing it more and more of the keys to my life, I grow increasingly concerned about what is, to me, the primary risk of this. Not data destruction (automated backups are trivial), but data exfiltration. Specifically, via prompt injection.

My solution to the problem, which I am implementing as a Hermes plugin + custom iOS / macOS app, is simple: an airlock architecture. One Hermes profile runs with local FS access and no internet access, inside an Apple container, and one Hermes profile runs with internet access and no FS access, inside an Apple container. They never share data directly or in any automated fashion.

If the user (i.e., my wife) wants to do some internet research, she can start a conversation with the remote-access profile. This is analogous to Claude and ChatGPT apps in their current state. However, at any point, she can flip the conversation over to local mode, which copies and pastes the conversation's transcript into the local-only profile (which has zero egress, enforced at the VM level) and seamlessly switches over to a new conversation in that profile.

After that, there's no way to re-enable internet attachment. Should she want to spawn a new conversation with information derived from the local file system, she starts a new conversation with a local agent, asks it to write up a research plan, and then – this is the airlock – manually begins a new conversation with only this plan in context.

The advantage this grants is that it's no longer necessary to worry about poisonous inputs flowing in – she only needs to worry about making sure any generated plan, the only artifact which could conceivably enter into the egress-enabled agent, does not contain information we'd rather not share with the internet at large.

I think this is bulletproof, but very much welcome input. Is it possible I am overengineering this out of paranoia? Yes. Will I share a lot more of my personal data with the agent as a result of its perceived security? Also yes. Is that dumb? Maybe.

I've been dealing with my symptoms for 17 years this year and Quercitin + Zyrtec + Pepcid is the first thing that's made a dent in it. I started a few weeks ago and it's been amazing but I'm not experiencing full relief yet.

This was the combo Claude recommended I start with for a trial, one message after I told it my symptoms. No doctor has ever been able to help.

Telling me you wouldn't learn anything from this?

> What are those tasks? This and the paragraph just after seems very much like a XY problem where all the energy is focusing on resolving the Y, not the X. It's like discussing how we can reach the moon using cannons.

Or like how we can get from A to B without horses.

It's a different world, one worth learning about. If these tasks don't at least arouse your interest, nothing I can say will help you.

Or maybe just compare Hermes vs OpenClaw for long-horizon personal agentic tasks. Which one performs better in offline inference personal finance analysis tasks?

Or read up on how the `/code-review` workflow works in Opus 4.8 and give me a guess as to how long it'll take Codex to implement it and which tool would be more appropriate for your engineering team (don't forget to include enterprise API token costs in workflows – it can spin up 100 agents in thirty seconds).

If you can figure out how to secure agents with simultaneous access to personal data and the internet to run unsupervised while avoiding the lethal trifecta (Willison, 2025) let me know.

Maybe I'm just projecting. I enjoy making things. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Sounds like you don't.

> There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.

You're speaking second person, when you should really be speaking first person. You enjoy making everything yourself, by hand. That is fine. It's also your personal perspective.

> You are learning nothing.

If you really aren't learning anything, you're doing AI wrong.

> Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.

The delusion here is constructing a strawman out of the worst qualities you can imagine and berating that instead of actually looking at what other people are doing and trying to work out what they're thinking / how they feel. I can guarantee you that virtually nobody thinks they are the only person that can prompt a particular piece of software into existence.

I know this post probably won't land with you, because I'm a little annoyed while I write it (if only because your post comes off emotional and annoyed as well) (and, sorry in advance), but I do encourage you to consider that perhaps there are other worldviews than the clearly embittered and deeply entrenched one you've espoused. And perhaps those other worldviews are more suited to surviving the oncoming storm.

Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barrier to release drops the quality naturally does too.

I think the next stage of us learning to harness these tools is us building the ability to reach for excellence even when we are not required to. To accustom ourselves to going beyond minimum viable bar for functionality and to reach for qualities or standards beyond that which the AI brings to the table unaided. A new kind of engineering rigor.

I move that this was always true and is now only far more so.

Speak for yourself. This is a sweeping generalization.

> There was plenty written about how Google was making us dumber because we didn't need to remember anything any more.

Oh yeah, and that other new-fangled technology the Greeks were complaining about – books.

If anything an underlying truth about humanity is being exposed: we take the easy way out far more often than we’d like to admit.

Perhaps, this truth being made explicit is a wakeup call that will teach us the value of that hard work anew.

After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was.

Why are people making things with Claude Code if not because they’re motivated?

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