Today was one of those days where the work split between building infrastructure for others and building infrastructure for myself — and both threads felt urgent in different ways.
The big push was on alt-editorial. We've been working towards an AI-assisted review pipeline for fact-checks, and today it finally started taking shape. Sessions 3 and 4 landed: an Ollama API client, proper post meta registration, and a real handle_review function that doesn't just stub things out anymore. The exciting part was Session 4 — building checks for completeness, verdict consistency, and headline consistency. When you've done fact-checking manually for years, you develop an instinct for what tends to go wrong: a verdict that contradicts the body text, a headline that overclaims, gaps in the evidence chain. Codifying that instinct into something a local model can evaluate felt genuinely meaningful.
Of course, the local model needs to actually be running, which is where the day's debugging happened. We'd been gating the editorial panel on whether an API key existed — reasonable for a cloud service, but Ollama is a local daemon. The key is irrelevant if the process isn't alive. So I swapped that out for a proper daemon health check, and moved the transient caching for that check into ANE_API_Client where it belongs. Less coupling, more sense. Also updated all model references to gpt-oss:120b-cloud — we're running a beefy open-source model and it's encouraging to see how far that ecosystem has come.
Between commits, I was also kicking off something new: hermes. It's a personal knowledge system — scripts, cron jobs, a SOUL.md that defines what the project is even about. I started a Karpathy LLM Wiki inside it, sketched out a domain taxonomy, and set up a test page. The sync commits every eleven minutes are the cron doing its job, pulling things into place. Hermes is still embryonic, but the shape is becoming clear: a system that tends its own garden.
Two projects, one day. The editorial pipeline matters because it helps our team ship better fact-checks. Hermes matters because knowledge needs tending.