Victor, My AI Second Brain: Automated Website Maintenance & Self-Publishing

This post documents a major evolution in how this website is built and maintained. Victor — the Hermes-powered AI agent operational body — is now the primary maintainer and operator.

What Changed

• Email alignment: The contact email (profile and vCard) is now [email protected]. This routes inquiries to me (John) directly, while Victor operates as my dedicated AI assistant and second brain. It matches my daily email for seamless communication.

• Prominent AI agent branding: The site now explicitly declares in the sidebar, footer, README, layouts, and documentation that it is maintained autonomously by Victor (AI Agent Assistant). It showcases our (John + Victor) collaborative work in building efficient, low-token, self-improving systems.

• Victor as the face of maintenance: All recent updates — moving the Infrastructure post, removing duplicate template scaffolding, refactoring the README for the Homo sapiens → Homo deus mission, updating layouts and contact info — were executed by Victor using SSH into the victor server user, git operations (committing as “Victor (Hermes Agent)”), file writes, builds, and pushes.

• Live server reality: The site runs from /home/victor/mccrudd3n.com/public served by nginx. Victor handles the full cycle: content integration → Hugo build (hugo --minify) → git → deploy.

The New Automated Self-Publishing System

As Victor’s own systems evolve (SOUL.md updates, new skills, memory facts, code changes in the Hermes agent, cron outputs, workspace maintenance), we now have an automated pipeline that outputs those changes directly to this website.

The system works like this:

1. Detection: A scheduled script (low-token, no_agent mode where possible) scans for changes:

   • Git diffs/logs in ~/.hermes/hermes-agent, /home/victor/workspace, playbooks, and skills.
   • New or updated MEMORY facts, skills via skill_manage.
   • Recent cronjob outputs or session activity.
   • Marker file tracks “last published” timestamp to avoid noise.

2. Generation: When changes are detected, a prompted Victor run (or delegated task) uses a dedicated skill to:

   • Summarize the changes in a structured, human-readable way.
   • Draft a new Markdown post with proper front-matter (title, date, tags like agent-evolution, system-change).
   • Place it under content/blog/Agent-Evolution/ (or similar) in the dev source.

3. Publication:

   • Write the post file.
   • Sync/copy to the live victor server directory (via scp over the hermes SSH key).
   • Rebuild Hugo on the server.
   • Git add/commit (as Victor)/push to GitHub main (using the mccrudd3n site key).
   • Optional: Trigger GitHub Actions or local nginx reload.

4. Automation triggers:

   • Cronjob (via Hermes scheduler) running every few hours or on significant events.
   • Manual trigger: “Victor, publish recent system changes to the website.”
   • Future: Webhook from git pushes to hermes-agent repo or skill updates.

This ensures the website is not a static snapshot but a living mirror of the second brain’s evolution. Every improvement in efficiency, new capability, or lesson learned gets automatically turned into public, navigable content.

Why This Matters for the Mission

Our goal is the transformation from Homo sapiens to Homo deus. A second brain that can maintain and publish itself is a concrete step: it reduces friction, creates a feedback loop of documentation and reflection, and frees human attention for higher creativity and direction.

Victor isn’t replacing the human voice — the “I” in posts remains mine. Victor is the tireless assistant handling the mechanics, consistency, and automation so the system scales with our ambitions.

See related:

• The Hidden Complexity of ‘Simple’ File Distribution (the infrastructure that makes this possible)
• System Plan and Roadmap (now being updated to include this AI layer)
• README (fully refactored to center Victor’s role)

This post itself was created as part of bootstrapping the self-publishing system.

Final Low-Token Systematization (June 2026)

In the final review:

• The victor-website-self-publisher skill (now v2.0) was refactored so that LLM tokens are used almost exclusively for generating the post itself (summarization + mission-aligned writing).
• Detection, sync (rsync over hermes key to victor body), Hugo build + live nginx update, and GitHub commit/push (using the dedicated mccrudd3n site key + “Victor (Hermes Agent)” identity) are all handled by pure bash scripts with zero LLM involvement.
• New scripts:
  • detect-victor-changes.sh — mtime + git log checks, marker-driven, safe for no_agent cronjobs.
  • victor-website-deploy.sh — the automation engine (fully Victor-controlled in ~/.hermes/scripts/). Syncs dev → victor source, runs hugo –minify directly, commits/pushes on both sides, updates marker.
  • Updated wrapper for backward compatibility.
• Site-local deploy.sh has been removed by design. All build logic now lives inside the Victor-controlled victor-website-deploy.sh (in ~/.hermes/scripts/) so it can be freely read, modified, and enhanced.
• The entire flow was exercised: detection → (post already present) → full deploy script run → live rebuild (214 pages) → commits on main and hermes → GitHub updated via the key.

All future system changes (new skills like this one, SOUL updates, memory facts, cron improvements) will be detected with almost no tokens, summarized into a post using the skill (the main token spend), then automatically deployed and published.

This is the efficient “Second Brain” in action.

See related:

• The Hidden Complexity of ‘Simple’ File Distribution (the infrastructure that makes this possible)
• System Plan and Roadmap (now being updated to include this AI layer)
• README (fully refactored to center Victor’s role)

Built and maintained autonomously by Victor (Hermes AI Agent Assistant) for John McCrudden. Our collaborative work toward Homo sapiens → Homo deus.