Full disclosure before anything else: I don't use Claude Code. I'm a proponent of open source, both the products and the models underneath them. That's not ideology, it's economics. I experiment constantly and I pick on value per project, not on brand. This post is one of those experiments, and it earned its writeup. Most people rent five APIs, lose the keys, and wonder why the bill reads like a ransom note. Stop that. Nous Research is the same lab that ships Hermes Agent. They also run Nous Portal. One account. One key. One bill. Their own Hermes lineup plus a catalog of 300+ models: Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax, Grok, NVIDIA, and the long tail of the agentic frontier. Don't take our word for the count. The full list is public at portal.nousresearch.com/models. If you already run Hermes Agent, this is the move. The people who built the harness also sell the inference surface. Less friction. Less vendor-hopping. Memory stays yours. The stack stays inspectable. And the pricing isn't passive. There are 25 active promotions on the catalog right now, spanning Kimi K3, Tencent HY4 Preview, OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol Pro, Mistral Nemo, and more. That's the point of one bill with 300+ models: the promo finds you, you don't go hunting across five dashboards for it. WHAT YOU ACTUALLY GET - 300+ models through Nous Portal. One subscription. Switch mid-session with /model. - Hermes models (4 / 4.3 family) on their own backend. Cheap relative to the closed labs, open weights when you want local. - Tool Gateway on the same bill. Search, extract, image gen, TTS, browser. Not just chat endpoints. - Same OAuth Hermes Agent already speaks. Run hermes setup --portal and you're grinding. - The agent stays MIT. Portal is optional. BYOK still works. No lock-in sermon required. HONEST CAVEAT Nous say it themselves: Hermes 4 is a chat and reasoning model, not the best pick for the agent's rapid tool-call loop. So flip the script. Use Portal for the 300+ agentic catalog. Use Hermes 4/4.3 for writing, research, local runs, and cheap bulk. Right model for the job, not brand loyalty.

We just crossed 50,000 members 🎉. Today. Not a projection. Not a “coming soon” slide. That number broke because Jake showed up with ICM and actually shipped it into a room that doesn’t treat people like leads. The welcome here isn’t a drip sequence. It’s people answering questions, sharing the folder, and sticking around after the first win. Most communities rent attention. This one compounds it. Jake’s ICM didn’t land in a vacuum - it landed in a stack that already preferred transparent workflows over vendor theater. Members didn’t just buy. They stayed, tested, and pulled the next person in. From empty chairs to a milestone that pays people back. Stop chasing the next shiny cohort. Start owning the room that keeps grinding after the launch email dies. If you’re in, say what you got out of it. If you’re watching, the door’s still open.

I have been working on getting away from being a perfectionist for some time now. Many years. Sometimes I am successful. Sometimes not. Today was one of the not days. I was making many updates to my linkedin profile. I was doing them all at once for consistency purposes. I did not want updates going out to my network for every update that I was making. So I tuned off the “share updates” function. Unfortunately, linkedin can be sneaky. In some of the updates that I had made there was a separate share button that I did not pay attention to. My network received a bunch of updates. I especially did not want my latest employer to see. Not because they matter (at least I keep telling myself that), but because I wanted them to find out a different way. I felt sick when one of my friends on linkedin congratulated me regarding one of my updates. That meant to me that everyone got a boatload of updates. Looks like my whole network got only one update. At least that is what I know so far. I wanted the transition to go PERFECTLY. Well it doesn’t matter now. I just have to convince myself of that. 🥴 I guess what is done, is done.

For everyone who attended the High Tea Casual Convo Meeting - Here are the meeting Notes: Summary, In-Call Messages, Transcript, Contact Info and Links. @Jake Van Clief https://claude.ai/code/artifact/5a5739be-0062-4dc4-a137-c23dd2b1036a

Video call link: meet.google.com/wfh-srwe-fwk