I know I talked about fake productivity last week, and I'm still kind of in it. But it got me thinking about the tools that actually help me get things done, the ones I know work.
And speaking of tools that don't work: Anthropic finally released part of Mythos called Fable, and what a joke. It's bad, expensive, and has so many safeguards you can't even ask it to build a simple site or a cybersecurity-related project. Thanks Mythos but I'll stick with Opus.
Minimal productivity
I don't want to turn this blog into a single-topic thing, even if I know a lot of you come here for bug bounty or cybersecurity tips. I'm taking a break from bug bounty right now. I still do a little but way less, focusing on other projects, planting long-term seeds while the AI hype and triage delays calm down.
Everyone has their own way to stay focused, whether in bug bounty, your job, or whatever you're building. For me, I've realized the more stuff I have around, the harder it gets. Less minimal, less effective.
So I went back to basics. A simple pomodoro timer, some soft background music, and go. It's basic but it's what works best to keep me from scattering too much.
I really want this thing called the busy.bar. Costs a fortune but I want it anyway, can't wait for it to ship.
Hermes
I tested OpenClaw a lot in the past, liked the concept. But security, updates, it wasn't great. Every time you update or change a file, something breaks and you have to SSH in to fix it. Not stable.
I decided to try Hermes, a competitor, and honestly it's way better. You can't use a Claude subscription anymore, you have to pay per API call, but the setup is much more reliable. Also simpler and more minimal. The analogy I'd make: Hermes is like the Apple of agents. You plug it in and it works. Less customization but it just works well. OpenClaw is more like Android, you can do a ton with it, it's great, but you have to get your hands dirty debugging more often. Both have their place, pick your poison.
For the provider, I chose Deepseek. Yes it's Chinese, but it works really well and is extremely cheap. I use it for the simpler tasks so it's fine.
And I have a skill that spawns Claude in TUI for bigger tasks, handles tmux, and I can manage everything from my phone. What a time to be alive.
Onyx
This is my personal Jarvis, I showed it a while ago with my living room dashboard. I came back to it by hooking it to Hermes and using OpenAI's Realtime API for actual voice conversations.
Now I can ask it to manage my projects, spin up Claude sessions, tell me my schedule, whatever I want, naturally by voice from the couch. I built a custom sports coach that handles my sessions and gives me my workouts. Works well but still needs improvement.
It helps me daily by reminding me what I need to do, what projects to push on, etc.
One thing that blew my mind: I have Philips Hue lights at home, and I recently got an Ikea donut lamp. It connects via Matter but not on the Hue protocol, so my light switches couldn't control it. I just asked Hermes how to fix it, and it installed a full Home Assistant, connected all my devices, configured everything, in minutes. Now I have a complete working smart-home setup.
We live in a hell of a world.
About cybersecurity, don't worry, I haven't stopped at all and I still love it. It's more the bug bounty platforms that don't make me want to do it regularly. I still do pentests and other missions in the meantime.
Have a good week everyone.
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