Hermes builds and deploys a calorie tracker

Jake Saunders built a separate home server for a coding agent so that experiments would not run on his everyday machine. His stack combined Hermes, Codex inference, Forgejo for Git and CI, and Coolify for deployment. Private networking and local DNS let the finished application use HTTPS within his own network.

The task was a mobile calorie tracker with reusable foods and meals. From one prompt, Saunders reports, Hermes created a repository, bootstrapped SvelteKit with Drizzle, Postgres and Tailwind, wrote the application and tests, and committed changes. It created a CI pipeline and worked through failures until the checks passed. It then containerized the application and its database and deployed both through Coolify.

The first human trial exposed a CSRF error when submitting data. Saunders sent another message. The agent diagnosed the issue, fixed it, added regression tests and redeployed. This correction matters because passing CI had not established that the app worked in the owner's actual use.

Saunders describes the application as a simple, isolated experiment. He had already assembled the server, credentials, networking and deployment tools. The agent still had power to delete its repositories and databases or misuse available credentials; tighter network isolation and approvals for consequential public actions remained future work. The reported success is a deployed personal application with one observed repair cycle.

Prompt
Original prompt

Source: Blog · Jake Saunders