System №01 · 2025 — Present

case study — running now

HermesAgent

Autonomous outbound intelligence — it finds, verifies, and emails 200 leads a day, then books the meeting.

Python · Docker · WireGuard · Oracle Cloud

00 brief

Cold outbound is a full-time job: finding leads, verifying emails, avoiding spam traps, sequencing sends, following up. Most "automation" still needs a human babysitter for every step that breaks.

built for — Schmoozzer — outbound for US medical practices, plumbing businesses, and Dubai agencies.

An agent should own the whole pipeline — and recover from its own failures.

01 the system

step 01

Acquisition through a residential exit

Scrapers run inside Docker behind a GlueTun WireGuard sidecar with a Rotterdam residential exit — target sites see a normal household connection, not a datacenter.

step 02

Verify before you burn a domain

Every address is bounce-scrubbed before it ever enters a sequence. 200 verified leads a day come out the other end — verified being the word that keeps deliverability alive.

step 03

The agent core decides, the guardrails bound it

33 tools and 258 skills under explicit tool-selection logic, with cost ceilings, retry logic, fallback paths, and graceful degradation. Autonomy is bounded on purpose.

step 04

Sequenced delivery, no human in the loop

Personalized sequences go out on schedule; replies and bounces feed back into the loop. From list to inbox, nobody touches it.

02 the hard parts

incident report · 01

Live disk-exhaustion crisis on Oracle Cloud

The instance filled its disk mid-run — the classic way an unattended system dies permanently.

resolutionSSH-recoverable disk management with staged cleanup paths; resolved the live incident with zero data loss and made the failure mode self-healing going forward.

incident report · 02

Staying deliverable at 200 sends/day

Volume cold email gets domains blacklisted within days if verification or pacing slips.

resolutionBounce scrubbing before sequencing, residential IP routing for acquisition, and send pacing under explicit ceilings — deliverability held at production volume.

incident report · 03

Autonomy without runaway cost

A 24/7 LLM agent with 33 tools can rack up API spend fast when something loops.

resolutionHard cost ceilings, retry budgets, and fallback paths — the agent degrades gracefully instead of spending gracefully.

03 results

200 verified, bounce-scrubbed leads per day across three markets (US medical, plumbing, Dubai agencies).

Booked a real sales demo (Karen, CW Service Pros) — the system drove paid conversion, not just lead generation.

Runs 24/7 unattended at v0.15.1 — the version number is the changelog of every failure it survived.

04 stack & ops

  • Docker multi-container on Oracle Cloud ARM64
  • GlueTun WireGuard VPN sidecar — Rotterdam residential exit
  • Cost ceilings + retry budgets + fallback paths
  • SSH-recoverable disk management after a live exhaustion incident

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