The Breeze
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// engineering lab · v3.2 · uptime 99.97%

Build logs from a quiet lab.

t3ch.b3rt.dev is the engineering arm of the empire — system design notes, reproducible experiments, and the day-by-day build log of a one-person R&D shop. Plain text, plain graphs, no marketing.

214Commits this quarter
17Active services
6.2 msP95 latency
0Incidents / 90d
// 01_build_log

Recent commits

  1. a3f9c1e refactor(cron): collapse four queues into one priority lane 2h ago · empire/cron
  2. 7e1d4b2 feat(agent): add subagent launcher with bounded context 1d ago · hermes/agents
  3. c402a88 perf(sites): cut empire hub cold start to 41ms via edge cache 3d ago · empire/sites
  4. f1b3d09 fix(voice): prevent cua-driver foreground steal on retry 4d ago · hermes/cua
  5. 9c8a7e5 docs: publish deployment runbook for empire stack 6d ago · docs
  6. 4b9e2c1 feat(brand): ship quarterly issue No. 04 art.b3rt.dev 1w ago · sites/art
  7. 2d6a0f4 chore(deps): bump hermes-agent to 0.14.2, security patch 1w ago · hermes/core
  8. 8e7b351 feat(skills): add hermes-agent-skill-authoring playbook 2w ago · hermes/skills
  9. 5c1f7a0 fix(llm): cap streaming tokens to prevent OOM on long tasks 2w ago · hermes/llm
  10. 1a4d29c feat(monitor): wire empire heartbeat to pager on 5xx spike 3w ago · empire/ops
  11. 6f0e8d3 test(agents): add replay harness for queued agent runs 3w ago · hermes/test
// 02_stack

The stack

Boring where it should be, novel where it earns its place.

01

Edge runtime

Workers on a global edge network. Cold start < 5ms, instant rollback via atomic deploys, no origin auth round-trip.

  • Cloudflare
  • WASM
  • KV
02

Agent mesh

A bounded set of named agents on a single priority queue. Cron-driven, human-gated, with replayable job ledgers.

  • Hermes
  • Cron
  • SQLite ledger
03

Static sites

Hand-rolled HTML + CSS, zero JS frameworks. Sub-15KB CSS, sub-25KB HTML, served from edge cache. Fast because there is nothing to load.

  • HTML5
  • CSS only
  • SVG art
04

Observability

Structured logs, a heartbeat cron, and one public status page. If a metric moves, a human is paged within five minutes.

  • Pings
  • Logs
  • Alerts
05

LLM routing

A tiered model router. Cheap structured work goes to a quantized local GGUF on the AMD box. Hard reasoning routes to a frontier model. Latency-budgeted.

  • GGUF
  • Router
  • Budgets
06

Brand tokens

One CSS file of design tokens drives every site. Swap a single custom property to retune the empire. No per-site build, no compile step.

  • Tokens
  • No build
  • CSS vars
// 03_experiments

Current experiments

Things that might become features, or might get deleted.

live

Subagent task ladder

Decompose a large build into bounded, claimable units. Each unit ships with a contract, a verifier, and a rollback plan. Staged rollout across three sites this quarter.

Started: 2026-07-04Owner: hermes/core
beta

Browser with intent

A typed browser action surface for agents. Clicks are addressable by element ref, not pixel coordinates. Failures escalate through a verify-rather-than-retry ladder.

Started: 2026-06-12Owner: hermes/cua
spec

Local LLM residency

Routing cheap, structured work to a quantized local GGUF on the AMD box. Goal: drop external-API cost per empire task by 40% without raising latency.

Started: 2026-08-01Owner: hermes/llm
spec

Replay ledger

Every agent run gets a deterministic replay from its ledger entry. If a run misbehaves, we replay it locally, find the diff, and patch the agent rather than the symptom.

Started: 2026-07-22Owner: hermes/agents
beta

Edge KV namespace per site

Move per-site counters and feature flags from origin to edge KV. Sub-millisecond reads, zero origin load, atomic rollouts via versioned keys.

Started: 2026-06-28Owner: empire/sites
// 04_principles

Operating principles

Five rules that govern every change to the empire stack.

  1. i.

    Boring wins.

    Prefer the tool you have already mastered. Novelty is a cost; it must earn its place against the maintenance tax.

  2. ii.

    Small surface, deep seams.

    Few endpoints, well-typed. The interface is the product; the implementation can be rewritten.

  3. iii.

    Humans gate merges.

    Agents propose, humans dispose. Every shipped card has a human reviewer named in the ledger entry.

  4. iv.

    Trace everything.

    If you cannot replay a run, you cannot debug it. Logs are append-only. Decisions cite their evidence.

  5. v.

    Refuse the seventh.

    One type family, two weights, one accent. The seventh idea is the one you say no to.