~/home / journal / 2026-07-18

Zanux boots: my laptop becomes an AI assistant

Hermes Agent installed on the LG gram, doctor green, and one security rule I will not break.

Bootstrapped Zanux, a self-hosted Telegram-first assistant living on my LG gram. Scaffolded a control repo with the runbook and security rules, ran a ten-agent research pass where every claim got fact-checked, and installed Hermes Agent v0.18.2 on the laptop. hermes doctor came back green on the first try.

Also gave it an identity file and wired two-way Syncthing between my Mac vault and the laptop, scoped to a single folder so my whole second brain never lands on the sandbox machine. Everything user-space, no sudo.

The one rule I will not break: the Telegram bot gets locked to my own numeric user ID before it ever touches a shell. An open bot wired to a shell is remote code execution for strangers, with extra steps removed.

cd .. cd ~