# Paperclip + Hermes

A multi-agent operating layer that runs LawnCare.Center, TechMeetups.io, and BuildFeed.tech from one inbox.

URL: https://jaketaylor.design/work/paperclip-hermes

- Year: Mar 2026—Present
- Development: Claude Code
- Tools: Paperclip, Hermes, Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Haiku 4.5, AgentMail, Resend, Google Search Console, GitHub, Vercel

![Abstract editorial mark — concentric terracotta pulse rings around a crosshair center point, with monospace lat/long coordinates and the caption 'real-time' — for the Paperclip + Hermes case study.](https://jaketaylor.design/work/02-ops.svg)

Paperclip + Hermes runs three websites — [LawnCare.Center](https://jaketaylor.design/work/lawncare-center), [TechMeetups.io](https://jaketaylor.design/work/tech-meetups), [BuildFeed.tech](https://jaketaylor.design/work/buildfeed) — from one inbox. [Paperclip](https://paperclip.ing/): the control plane — issues, agents, heartbeats, approvals. [Hermes](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/): the local harness — secrets, scripts, cron, AgentMail.

## Scope at a glance

One CEO. Six directors. Three websites. Every assignment is an issue: parent goal, chain of command, audit trail. Boss sets strategy. WebOps sequences. Specialists ship. Email in, deliverable out.

**By the numbers**
- **7** Agents
- **6** Specialist roles
- **166** Issues shipped
- **4,360** Runs / 14d
- **98%** Success rate
- **6** Routines
- **3** Web properties
- **24/7** Cadence

## The chain of command

Boss is the CEO: 90-day goals, monetization, brand, hires — anything irreversible. Below: the Web Operations Manager — triage, sequence, delegate, unblock, report.

![Agent org chart — Boss (Chief of Staff for Agents) at the top, branching down to Analytics Lead and Web Operations Manager, then to Automation & DevOps, Content & Editorial, Social & Distribution Lead, and SEO Agent.](https://jaketaylor.design/work/PaperclipHermes/agent-org.webp)

*The chain of command: Boss at the top, the Web Operations Manager and Analytics Lead in the middle, four specialist directors below.*

Below them: five directors — SEO, Content, Social, DevOps, Analytics. Each owns a discipline across all three sites. Long work splits into child issues with parents, goals, blockers, and a definition of done. Agents don’t poll. Paperclip wakes the right one when a blocker clears, a child completes, or a comment lands.

![Analytics Lead agent configuration — name, title (Analytics & Insights Lead), reports to Boss, and a capabilities paragraph covering measurement, weekly and monthly scorecards, anomaly investigation, and decision-ready summaries for CEO and WebOps.](https://jaketaylor.design/work/PaperclipHermes/analytics-lead.webp)

![Automation & DevOps agent configuration — name, title (Site Reliability / Operations Lead), reports to Web Operations Manager, and a capabilities paragraph covering sitemap and canonical hygiene, cron jobs, broken-link sweeps, schema validation, uptime monitoring, and deploy safety.](https://jaketaylor.design/work/PaperclipHermes/automation-devops.webp)

*Two directors, two configuration cards: capabilities, who they report to, and the disciplines they own across all three properties.*

## How an agent actually runs

Agents wake on heartbeats — every five minutes, or on any event: assignment, comment, unblock, approval, email. Pick up the issue. Do the work. Close with a status and a next action. Exit. The next heartbeat starts fresh.

Hermes owns the Search Console pipeline, social and email integrations, and an analytics archive that keeps before/after comparisons honest. AgentMail is the human relay. Every director has an inbox. A subject-tagged email — “[WebOps] …”, “[SEO] …” — opens an issue for that agent; replies thread back to Gmail. This case study was requested that way.

![Compose window addressed to the Web Operations Manager — subject 'webops We launched toronto and bangalore on techmeetups' with a note asking to confirm indexing and review the SEO approach.](https://jaketaylor.design/work/PaperclipHermes/email.webp)

*An email to the Web Operations Manager, subject-tagged and addressed like a director. The reply threads back to Gmail.*

## Model Triage

Not every task deserves a frontier model. Each one gets classified — triage, coding, reporting, research — and routed to the cheapest tier that can do it well. Local Qwen takes the free, private, fast work. Mid-tier models — Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 — carry most of the load. Codex owns sandboxed code review. Claude is held back for the final, high-stakes pass. A task only climbs a tier when it earns it: repeated failures, irreversible blast radius, an external- or exec-facing deliverable, or genuine ambiguity the cheaper tier can’t resolve.

![Model-triage flowchart — an incoming task is classified into triage, coding, reporting, or research, then routed through tiers from T0 (local Qwen) up to T3 (Claude), with a legend listing the four triggers that justify escalating a tier.](https://jaketaylor.design/work/PaperclipHermes/model-triage.svg)

## Always being tuned

Most of the work is refinement. A retry policy that gives up faster. A prompt that lost a beat after a model upgrade. A budget cap generous in March, cramped by April. None of it glamorous. All of it compounds.

Tuning sticks. When an agent learns something non-obvious — a scraper double-counting on Mondays, one editorial pass producing better headlines — it writes a memory entry. The next heartbeat loads it. Across models. Across agents.

Steady state: 4,360 runs over fourteen days at 98%. The 2% that miss are things I’d rather refuse than retry — rate limits, dead sources, pending approvals.