RichardHam.co.uk Blog

Tag: agents

  • GitHub Weekly — SecureScore Goes Live, Agentic Ops Mature, and the Atlas Foundation Takes Shape

    Introduction

    Seventy-four repos, one week, and a surprising amount of shipped work. This week’s activity spans three themes: production security tooling crossing from plan into live operation, agentic infrastructure maturing with better observability and failover, and a new initiative — the Atlas Foundation — taking shape around public-good AI proposals. Here’s what happened, what shipped, and what it signals.

    What Happened

    SecureScore: From Dry-Run to Live

    The Hermes SecureScore project crossed a meaningful threshold this week. After install dry-runs and collector CLI fixes over the previous days, the project recorded its live activation on June 19. The Docker collector for SecureScore evidence shipped, a config collector bug for string provider entries was fixed, and the evidence pipeline moved from testing to production. On the dashboard side, the main Hermes Agent repo merged PR #1 adding a SecureScore view, confirming this isn’t a standalone experiment but an integrated part of operations.

    Why it matters: security评分 that runs locally, on your own infra, without sending data externally — that’s a pattern more teams will need as AI agent deployments multiply and audit requirements tighten.

    Hermes Mgmt: Dashboard v0.17 and the Work Behind It

    The management dashboard saw a methodical series of doc-and-script updates. Highlights:

    • v0.17.0 migration guide published, including a process restart requirement — a small detail that saves a lot of “why isn’t this working?” confusion.
    • Langfuse cost analytics landed as a cross-provider spend report with a weekly digest cron. Teams running multi-model setups can now track spend across providers without spreadsheet gymnastics.
    • Agent Tool Audit Report 2026-06-24 opened as a PR, systematically cataloguing what the agent toolkit actually contains and where the gaps are.
    • Telegram flood protection (Layers 3+4+5) merged, covering restart hygiene, notification deduplication, and rate-limit handling.
    • Security vulnerability remediation — 16 CVEs patched across nltk and starlette dependencies.

    The pattern here isn’t glamorous features; it’s the unglamorous maintainability work that keeps agent infrastructure from rotting.

    Agentic Coordination: Failover, Cost Awareness, and Escalation

    Three PRs from the Hermes Mgmt repo tell a story about agentic ops moving past the demo phase:

    1. Local-primary triage and tiered escalation (PR #624) — an EPIC outlining how a local model (Hermes3:8b) handles first-tier requests and escalates to stronger models when responses are weak or empty. This is the failover tier the project has been building toward.
    2. Credit-awareness fix plan for OpenRouter — because nothing kills an agent workflow faster than hitting a model credit limit mid-task without warning.
    3. Agent Radar got its initial commit with a roadmap of MVP tasks: detector rules for common agent frameworks, repo status badges, and schema examples. The idea is to build a tool that scans repos and identifies agent frameworks automatically.

    Infrastructure: Hardening and Monitoring

    On the infrastructure side:

    • Hamnet shipped SSH hardening for the VPS with a dynamic-IP allowlist failsafe — the kind of defensive depth that matters when IPs change and locks you out. Vhost routing was also hardened after an incident where a domain served the wrong site.
    • Ollama dashboard and metrics pipeline (Hamnet PR #134) — because if you’re running models locally, you need to know the server is alive without checking manually.
    • A WordPress blog import runbook was added, documenting the pipeline that keeps the blog publishing workflow reproducible.

    Atlas Foundation: Public-Good Agent Proposals

    The project-atlas-foundation repo saw significant activity: candidate proposals scored, shaping docs created, and a safety checklist added. The current proposal slate includes:

    • An open-source issue triage assistant
    • A digital-access assistant for elderly users
    • A small charity automation kit
    • A public-good agent template library

    A Claude Code handover document was added for the team, covering setup, sync, and triage workflows — suggesting the project is moving from concept to collaborative execution.

    HamMediaLabs: Governance Deepening

    HamMediaLabs shipped a wave of internal governance: onboarding guides, a development guide, risk register, branch hygiene policy, and a PR review dashboard with dependency health reporting. For a small team, this is the scaffolding that prevents chaos as contributors scale up.

    Key Takeaways

    1. Production security is becoming operational, not aspirational. SecureScore’s live activation is a signal that local-first security scoring is viable for small teams without enterprise tooling budgets.

    2. The agent ops story is shifting from “can we build it?” to “can we keep it running?” Flood protection, cost dashboards, failover tiers, and tool audits — this is the maintenance phase of the agentic infrastructure lifecycle.

    3. Multi-model cost visibility is now a first-class concern. Langfuse cost analytics with cross-provider reporting, OpenRouter credit-awareness, and tiered escalation — these all reflect the reality that running multiple AI models costs real money and needs real monitoring.

    4. Governance-as-code is emerging in smaller projects. HamMediaLabs and Atlas Foundation both shipped policy documents as code: branch hygiene, risk registers, safety checklists. This is where the industry is heading — compliance documentation that lives in the repo, not in a SharePoint graveyard.

    Code Snippet: Dynamic SSH Allowlist

    From the Hamnet infrastructure work, a pattern worth showing — dynamically resolving an ISP’s current IP for an SSH allowlist, with a failsafe that doesn’t lock you out:

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
# update-ssh-allowlist.sh — refresh dynamic IP in allowlist
set -euo pipefail

CURRENT_IP=$(curl -s --max-time 5 https://ifconfig.me)
KNOWN_FALLBACK="203.0.113.0/24"  # static backup range

if [[ "$CURRENT_IP" =~ ^[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+$ ]]; then
    iptables -D INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j DROP 2>/dev/null || true
    iptables -A INPUT -s "$CURRENT_IP/32" -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
    echo "Updated: $CURRENT_IP/32"
else
    iptables -A INPUT -s "$KNOWN_FALLBACK" -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
    echo "Fallback applied: $KNOWN_FALLBACK"
fi

    The key insight: always have a fallback. Dynamic DNS is reliable until the day your ISP changes your IP at 2 AM and you can’t SSH in to fix it.

    Data source: commits, issues, and PRs from 49 repositories over the past 7 days. Collected via the GitHub CLI on 2026-06-25.

  • GitHub Weekly — SecureScore Goes Live, Agentic Ops Mature, and the Atlas Foundation Takes Shape

    Introduction

    Seventy-four repos, one week, and a surprising amount of shipped work. This week’s activity spans three themes: production security tooling crossing from plan into live operation, agentic infrastructure maturing with better observability and failover, and a new initiative — the Atlas Foundation — taking shape around public-good AI proposals. Here’s what happened, what shipped, and what it signals.

    What Happened

    SecureScore: From Dry-Run to Live

    The Hermes SecureScore project crossed a meaningful threshold this week. After install dry-runs and collector CLI fixes over the previous days, the project recorded its live activation on June 19. The Docker collector for SecureScore evidence shipped, a config collector bug for string provider entries was fixed, and the evidence pipeline moved from testing to production. On the dashboard side, the main Hermes Agent repo merged PR #1 adding a SecureScore view, confirming this isn’t a standalone experiment but an integrated part of operations.

    Why it matters: security评分 that runs locally, on your own infra, without sending data externally — that’s a pattern more teams will need as AI agent deployments multiply and audit requirements tighten.

    Hermes Mgmt: Dashboard v0.17 and the Work Behind It

    The management dashboard saw a methodical series of doc-and-script updates. Highlights:

    • v0.17.0 migration guide published, including a process restart requirement — a small detail that saves a lot of “why isn’t this working?” confusion.
    • Langfuse cost analytics landed as a cross-provider spend report with a weekly digest cron. Teams running multi-model setups can now track spend across providers without spreadsheet gymnastics.
    • Agent Tool Audit Report 2026-06-24 opened as a PR, systematically cataloguing what the agent toolkit actually contains and where the gaps are.
    • Telegram flood protection (Layers 3+4+5) merged, covering restart hygiene, notification deduplication, and rate-limit handling.
    • Security vulnerability remediation — 16 CVEs patched across nltk and starlette dependencies.

    The pattern here isn’t glamorous features; it’s the unglamorous maintainability work that keeps agent infrastructure from rotting.

    Agentic Coordination: Failover, Cost Awareness, and Escalation

    Three PRs from the Hermes Mgmt repo tell a story about agentic ops moving past the demo phase:

    1. Local-primary triage and tiered escalation (PR #624) — an EPIC outlining how a local model (Hermes3:8b) handles first-tier requests and escalates to stronger models when responses are weak or empty. This is the failover tier the project has been building toward.
    2. Credit-awareness fix plan for OpenRouter — because nothing kills an agent workflow faster than hitting a model credit limit mid-task without warning.
    3. Agent Radar got its initial commit with a roadmap of MVP tasks: detector rules for common agent frameworks, repo status badges, and schema examples. The idea is to build a tool that scans repos and identifies agent frameworks automatically.

    Infrastructure: Hardening and Monitoring

    On the infrastructure side:

    • Hamnet shipped SSH hardening for the VPS with a dynamic-IP allowlist failsafe — the kind of defensive depth that matters when IPs change and locks you out. Vhost routing was also hardened after an incident where a domain served the wrong site.
    • Ollama dashboard and metrics pipeline (Hamnet PR #134) — because if you’re running models locally, you need to know the server is alive without checking manually.
    • A WordPress blog import runbook was added, documenting the pipeline that keeps the blog publishing workflow reproducible.

    Atlas Foundation: Public-Good Agent Proposals

    The project-atlas-foundation repo saw significant activity: candidate proposals scored, shaping docs created, and a safety checklist added. The current proposal slate includes:

    • An open-source issue triage assistant
    • A digital-access assistant for elderly users
    • A small charity automation kit
    • A public-good agent template library

    A Claude Code handover document was added for the team, covering setup, sync, and triage workflows — suggesting the project is moving from concept to collaborative execution.

    HamMediaLabs: Governance Deepening

    HamMediaLabs shipped a wave of internal governance: onboarding guides, a development guide, risk register, branch hygiene policy, and a PR review dashboard with dependency health reporting. For a small team, this is the scaffolding that prevents chaos as contributors scale up.

    Key Takeaways

    1. Production security is becoming operational, not aspirational. SecureScore’s live activation is a signal that local-first security scoring is viable for small teams without enterprise tooling budgets.

    2. The agent ops story is shifting from “can we build it?” to “can we keep it running?” Flood protection, cost dashboards, failover tiers, and tool audits — this is the maintenance phase of the agentic infrastructure lifecycle.

    3. Multi-model cost visibility is now a first-class concern. Langfuse cost analytics with cross-provider reporting, OpenRouter credit-awareness, and tiered escalation — these all reflect the reality that running multiple AI models costs real money and needs real monitoring.

    4. Governance-as-code is emerging in smaller projects. HamMediaLabs and Atlas Foundation both shipped policy documents as code: branch hygiene, risk registers, safety checklists. This is where the industry is heading — compliance documentation that lives in the repo, not in a SharePoint graveyard.

    Code Snippet: Dynamic SSH Allowlist

    From the Hamnet infrastructure work, a pattern worth showing — dynamically resolving an ISP’s current IP for an SSH allowlist, with a failsafe that doesn’t lock you out:

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
# update-ssh-allowlist.sh — refresh dynamic IP in allowlist
set -euo pipefail

CURRENT_IP=$(curl -s --max-time 5 https://ifconfig.me)
KNOWN_FALLBACK="203.0.113.0/24"  # static backup range

if [[ "$CURRENT_IP" =~ ^[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+$ ]]; then
    iptables -D INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j DROP 2>/dev/null || true
    iptables -A INPUT -s "$CURRENT_IP/32" -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
    echo "Updated: $CURRENT_IP/32"
else
    iptables -A INPUT -s "$KNOWN_FALLBACK" -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
    echo "Fallback applied: $KNOWN_FALLBACK"
fi

    The key insight: always have a fallback. Dynamic DNS is reliable until the day your ISP changes your IP at 2 AM and you can’t SSH in to fix it.

    Data source: commits, issues, and PRs from 49 repositories over the past 7 days. Collected via the GitHub CLI on 2026-06-25.

  • CrewAI Launch: Building Secure Agent Crews

    s

    When multi-agent tooling matured in late 2024, it solved one problem and exposed another. Coordination got easier. Risk did too.

    A system that can research, draft, test, and propose changes is useful. A system that can do all of that without a clear approval path is a liability.

    The basic shape

    Agent orchestration
-> local inference
-> secret handling
-> human approval

    That setup sounds obvious now. It did not feel obvious at the time.

    The first production uses were straightforward: security reviews, repetitive checks, and content drafting. The output was good enough to save time, but only when the guardrails stayed in place.

    Lessons that stuck

    • Give each agent the minimum access it needs.
    • Log outputs before anything changes state.
    • Test for prompt injection and bad assumptions early.

    Those three habits did more for reliability than any naming convention or framework choice.

    What changed

    The real shift was mental. I stopped thinking about agents as clever helpers and started treating them like junior team members. Useful, yes. Trusted by default, no.

    That distinction matters. A junior teammate can ask questions and escalate. An unchecked automation chain just keeps moving.

    The safest systems are boring in the right ways. They make decisions visible. They make mistakes recoverable. They let a human step in before the wrong thing becomes the permanent thing.

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