From the Foothills to the Mountain: The Shadow of Hermes Peak
About six months ago I asked Claude to help me fix something on my own machine. A small home-IT thing. The kind I’d lived around for months. It took half an hour.
I noticed something I didn’t expect.
The next idea I had was bigger. Not because the tool had got bigger. Because the first idea had been easy enough that the next one stopped looking absurd.
That’s the trick. Every peak you reach shows you the silhouette of the next one. You couldn’t see it from the foothills. You can’t quite reach it from where you’re standing. But you can see its shape, and once you’ve seen the shape you can’t un-see it.
Looking back, the order of the silhouettes was the argument.
The climb, in order
Fix a home IT thing. Half an hour. Peak one.
Stand up a server. Suddenly imaginable. If Claude could walk me through one config file, it could walk me through ten. Peak two.
Hook up the *arr stack. Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, the lot. Things I’d read about for years and never started. The reason I’d never started was the threshold. The threshold collapsed. Peak three.
Get to 8TB on a Mac mini. A storage problem becomes a procurement problem becomes a wiring problem becomes a working media server in the corner of the room. Peak four.
Build a site. Not from a template. From a brief, to a static site live on the internet under a domain I’d bought that morning. Peak five.
Build an app. Real surface, real logic, real users in mind. Peak six.
Build several prototypes. Plural. The unit-of-work changed. I stopped counting what I was making because making a thing stopped being a project and started being a Tuesday. Peak seven.
Build an agency around it. That’s the one I’m standing on. Articulate. Started while I was still climbing the one before. Peak eight.
What you can see from peak eight
From peak eight, the route ahead has a shape. Each climb needed a thing the previous climb had taught me to want. Memory of what we’d done before. Context about the businesses I was working with. A team of specific assistants, each with their own brief. Tools that talk to my email, my calendar, my CRM. A private place to keep what’s mine. Agents that talk to other agents.
Hermes is the first peak that has all of those in view at once.
Six months ago, “build an agency” was a sentence I would not have said out loud. From the foothills it didn’t have a shape. Each peak before it gave it one more edge.
I’m writing this somewhere on the ridge between agency built and whatever’s next. The summit is visible. The route is roughly clear. And the route was never visible from where I started — only one peak ahead, ever, at any time.
That’s mountaineering. Same logic seems to hold here.
The Marketing Engine Pilot is built on the same climb
Six AI workflows, installed in ninety days, on your stack, owned by you at the end. Each one teaches you to want the next. The agency is in the kit.
Talk to Anthony →