Today I shut down Hermes and launched Moment Savor my first independent SaaS app.
Amp and Swamp made this possible.
Amp handles the novel work, while Swamp turns the repeatable parts into observable, deterministic tools.
Hermes had become an increasingly awkward fit. Within Hermes, local models were slow, effectively bottlenecked into one thread, and kept fighting the architecture I wanted. The clearest warning came when a local model decided an air-quality alert should turn on the sirens attached to my cameras through Home Assistant. It woke up my wife, my sister-in-law, and me. I kept trying to constrain Hermes with Swamp.
That was backwards. I was asking a general-purpose agent to become a reliable runtime, then adding boundaries every time it surprised me.
Amp Became the Place Where I Work
Amp's desktop app and PWA changed the practical shape of my agent work. I no longer need to SSH into another machine just to keep a task moving. I can run local runners without a UI, keep several threads moving, spin up sub-agents, and hand context from one thread to another with a URL.
I also have Amp's Orbs working for Moment Savor. An Orb boots a remote development environment for a thread and removes most of the local worktree juggling. I do not have that working for every large repository yet, but it is already good enough to make Amp's intentionally provocative “local dev is dead” pitch feel less absurd than it did a week ago.
I am paying $20 per month for Amp and using a $200 Codex subscription as the model backend. Codex is still generous enough that I have not managed to exhaust it. During one push for Moment Savor, Amp coordinated enough sub-agents to extract and publish 42 Swamp extensions from the agentic layer of my app. The extension audit alone showed 374 million tokens, while the metered charges visible to me were still measured in cents.
That kind of abundance makes it tempting to ask the model to do everything, but I am moving in the opposite direction. Codex's token subsidy won't last forever, but since the kitchen is still open, it's time to cook up as much deterministic swamp muck as we can.
Swamp Became the Runtime
I do not use Swamp as another MCP full of loosely related tools. It is the integration and automation layer underneath the agent. Linear, Datadog, Better Stack, and the agentic pieces inside Moment Savor are models and workflows with typed inputs, versioned output, and run history.
The division of labor is simple: make the LLM touch points as small as possible. Let a model interpret a photo, summarize an error, or make a novel decision. Do not make it rediscover how to upload a file, call Home Assistant, or append to an Obsidian note every time. Those parts belong in deterministic model methods and workflows.
My published Swamp cli-agent extension makes that boundary practical. A workflow can use an existing model for one bounded judgment, then return to deterministic execution. The agent remains useful without becoming the architecture.
This is also why moving away from Hermes does not mean moving away from local models. They can still be one small piece of a workflow. They just do not get the keys to everything by default.
I Finally Shipped
Moment Savor went live this morning. The business exists, the payment merchant is connected, and I can charge a customer. I built the first version with sweat equity, a couple hundred dollars in tokens and setup costs, and a lot of help from agents.
The technical temptation is to keep going. I already have Better Stack feeding an agentic layer and the beginnings of a “company brain” that can challenge an idea, suggest a much larger version, or ask for the smallest viable one.
But the next work is not another clever workflow. It is social accounts, advertising, talking to people, and finding out whether anyone wants this. I need to have the discipline to treat Moment Savor as if it's in maintenance mode long enough to validate the idea before I build more of it. But first I have to ship just a few more features I have still in the pipeline…
So this is the current setup: Amp is where I explore and build. Swamp is where repeated behavior becomes a tool I can inspect and trust. Moment Savor is finally in the world, where the next useful data will come from customers rather than another agent run.