This Week
I got the Hermes Achievements contribution out the door. I took the Hermes achievements plugin, added unlock notifications, confetti on every one, a Discord webhook, share cards, and then sent it all back as a pull request. That whole story is live now in How I Made Hermes Achievements Better And Gave It Back, and the plugin is on GitHub.
And I launched the Hermes Command Center, a read-only dashboard that answers one question: what is my Hermes doing right now? It pulls together active processes, today’s token use and cost, cron health, skill usage, memory fill, and the install state of every plugin all in one screen. The code lives on GitHub.
It was the first time I looked at the plugin’s actual code in depth, not just used it. Figuring out where the notification hook went and keeping the original behavior intact took real reading. The merge felt good because I made something other people can pull down themselves.
Alongside all that I have been hard at work on the TopStart App, my menu bar app that pins your favorite Shortcuts to the menu bar with a single click. The new home page is live at TopStart.app if you want to see where it is headed.
Shipping a contribution teaches you more about the code than a month of using it. Reading the source to add a feature is the fastest way to understand a tool.
What I Learned
This week also had a proper debugging rabbit hole. The featured images on every article kept getting cut off, and every CSS fix I tried looked right in the editor and still failed on the page.
Turns out the theme bakes a hard-cropped 950×500 version of each image on disk. Once the crop is in the file, no CSS rule can put the pixels back. The fix was serving the full 3:2 version from the template instead.
Once the crop is in the file, no CSS rule can put the pixels back.Cliff
The lesson stuck: when a style change looks right but nothing moves, check whether the thing you are fighting even exists at the size you are targeting.
Next Week
I am going to rotate out of the Hermes deep dives for a bit and write a product review. The site has gone all AI Tools for two months and the product categories are starving. Ready to dust off one of the mainstays on the desk.
Small goal this week: break the habit of only writing about whatever I am building with Hermes.
Published Saturday, August 29, 2026.
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I write about AI tools, automation, and the stuff I actually use. If this article helped, there is more where it came from.
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