The workflow: Hermes (orchestrator) routes every request. Skills already declare which model tier they need (the model: frontmatter is real, not decorative). When a request touches sensitive data, Hermes defaults to the local model — Gemma, via the Ollama instance Hermes already runs, currently idle — instead of escalating straight to Claude. 1. Local model scopes the request — reads the sensitive material, decides what needs coding. It only proposes; it never makes the final call. 2. A deterministic script does the actual encoding — swaps real names/values for stable per-entity codes via a codebook (table lookup, not AI judgment). . 3. A preflight check verifies nothing raw survived before anything leaves the machine — the check that can demonstrably fail on a bad run, not just a claim that coding happened. 4. Only then does it ask permission to send the coded payload out — your "greenlight and asks permission" step. 5. Claude works entirely on coded tokens — never sees a real name, real entity, real number. 6. The same local codebook decodes Claude's answer back to real names before you see it. That's the full round trip. Claude never sees a real name; you never see a code. What am I not thinking of?

Every build has to have a manual for operation built alongside it. I’m shipping enough stuff that a plain language ‘how to use’ this document is now standard for me. Each draft of something needs to be understood by the client. A simple thing that is painfully obvious in retrospect.

@Eugene Seva and I jumped on a video meet after I commented on one of his posts. He shared the GitHub repo of his work with me. A cool build of a Japanese digital business card for realtors. QR code, AI chat, mortgage calculator. Live site, paying customers, 140 merged pull requests, still shipping daily. Good build. I spent the day trying to work out the Western version. Never got there. What I got instead was better. That product works because the company behind it is a Tokyo brokerage sitting on 4.5 million sales records and 6,000 new listings a day. The app is a skin over a filing cabinet they already owned. Take the data away and it's a link-in-bio page with a chatbot attached. In the US that data is MLS-licensed per organization, and you need a contract with each one even going through an aggregator. That's a funded-company problem, not a weekend one. So I went looking for something that runs on nothing licensed. Six shapes, six walls. Business cards lose to a free tier with 150,000 reviews. Valuation needs an AVM license. Chat and nurture is held by people charging $395 a month. The fifth one nearly got me. Since 2024, buyers sign a written agreement about agent compensation before touring a house, and everyone is confused by it. No tool exists. I had the whole thing designed. Then I checked whether a real estate agent is permitted to explain a contract to a client. They are not. That's unauthorized practice of law, in all fifty states, and it's the agent handing the document over who carries the exposure. Insurers started writing generative-AI exclusions in January, so it wouldn't be covered either. Here's the part you'll care about. The constraint ended up as the folder structure. "Never produce client-addressed output" is a rule, and a rule sitting in rules.md is a suggestion. So it's also a check script. It reads every skill file, and if a client salutation turns up in one, it exits 1. Same for listing data. Each skill declares its inputs in a table, and the check fails if any input is a source we can't legally touch.

It’s live. Starting today, everyone in Clief Notes has access to the new Clief Notes AI. The easiest way to use it? Don’t overthink it. Ask it the question you would normally ask me. “Where should I start?” “What should I focus on next?” “Where did you talk about [topic]?” It’ll use what’s already inside Clief Notes to help answer you and point you toward the right lesson or resource when there’s something worth going deeper on. The goal isn’t to give you another AI tool to play with. It’s to make everything already inside this community easier to actually use. If you want Access to it Comment "READY" and we'll send you access to it!

Yes. I’m being forced to the dark side. I’m looking to push all of our learnings we have here into the framework of what’s possible inside Enterprise security. My first step is to add this post to the community and see if you will drop wisdom, repos, and guidance in the comments. Thank you kindly.