// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
My Agent Setup
(this was written by a human. I had my gtm-agent review and make some changes, but I then mostly reversed all of those taking me 10x more time than had I just shipped it with missing commas, run-on sentences, and 6 instead of six. Refer to "Has it been worth it?" at the end.)
A few people have asked about my agent setup, but first let me talk about the goal. I'm working on a few products as well as a nonprofit. The only product I've mentioned so far is The Daily FM, which is just something I wanted so I built it.
The goal of all this agent experimentation is to scale multiple products and the nonprofit with fewer staff and volunteers than would otherwise be needed. In short, I'm creating a staff of agents. I'm about a month into this charade, so it's still early days.
I know the leading influencers in the space are yelling into their mics about thousands of agents (what happened to swarms?), self-improving loops (or is it graphs?), etc., but before getting to thousands, I'd like to start with a modest six.
All the agents are currently Hermes agents, but I predict this will change at some point. They are defined by SOUL.md, AGENTS.md, skills, tools, MCP servers, a Mnemosyne memory bank per profile, and a shared Obsidian wiki synced to my machine. In theory this is all portable. It's just a few easily-locatable 1's and 0's. Right? RIGHT?
Obsidian is proving to be really cool. Like everyone else I discovered it when Karpathy published his LLM wiki brain dump. It didn't click at first, but the more I use it, the more useful it becomes as a "business operating manual." It lets me capture processes so agents can spin up and just know how things work 'round here.
Currently all agents use OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol and can spin up subagents using GPT-5.6 Terra. I was originally using Anthropic's Fable, but I got slapped with an API bill and realized Anthropic doesn't allow subscription usage for this setup, so I switched to GPT.
Frontier models are mostly interchangeable for this type of work. I probably don't need Sol and will adjust if needed. I'd love to use an open-weights model, but I have little incentive to switch when a $100 OpenAI subscription gets the job done. I'd even move to the $200 plan if needed.
All six run on a simple DigitalOcean Basic Droplet: 4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, and 160 GB of disk. I did have to upgrade from 4 gigs RAM because the box kept swapping to disk. I secure it with Tailscale and don't expose any public ports.
I mentioned dev-agent above, but I still use Claude Code with Fable, and Codex as a fallback, for 95% of my coding. I just feel at home in the terminal on my local machine, watching code changes and reasoning happen in real time. I know... so uncool.