Chad Arimura | My agent setup
www<br>Renegade BBS<br>8-bit Game
August 11th, 2026
My agent setup
(this was written by a human. I had my gtm-agent review and make some changes, but I then mostly reversed all of those taking me 10x more time than had I just shipped it with missing commas, run-on sentences, and 6 instead of six. Refer to "Has it been worth it?" at the end.)
A few people have asked about my agent setup, but first let me talk about the goal. I'm working on a few products as well as a nonprofit. The only product I've mentioned so far is The Daily FM, which is just something I wanted so I built it.
The goal of all this agent experimentation is to scale multiple products and the nonprofit with fewer staff and volunteers than would otherwise be needed. In short, I'm creating a staff of agents. I'm about a month into this charade, so it's still early days.
I know the leading influencers in the space are yelling into their mics about thousands of agents (what happened to swarms?), self-improving loops (or is it graphs?), etc., but before getting to thousands, I'd like to start with a modest six.
The agents
Profiles
ea-agent: My executive admin. It's basically there to remind me of stuff, interact with my calendar, and manage work in Linear like a program manager.
ops-agent: Monitors site performance and Sentry, makes sure stuff keeps running, and triages issues. It either fixes them, assigns them to dev-agent, or sends them to me.
dev-agent: My core developer, with GitHub access to a few projects.
gtm-agent: My marketer. It looks at funnels, traffic numbers, and social media, and has skills for writing and social media management.
research-agent: Searches the web, does long asynchronous research, and builds reports.
vps-agent: My infrastructure manager, with root access to the agent box. It can create new agents, add MCP servers and skills, and handle server maintenance. It only responds to me in Buzz.
Runtime and memory
All the agents are currently Hermes agents, but I predict this will change at some point. They are defined by SOUL.md, AGENTS.md, skills, tools, MCP servers, a Mnemosyne memory bank per profile, and a shared Obsidian wiki synced to my machine. In theory this is all portable. It's just a few easily-locatable 1's and 0's. Right? RIGHT?
Obsidian is proving to be really cool. Like everyone else I discovered it when Karpathy published his LLM wiki brain dump. It didn't click at first, but the more I use it, the more useful it becomes as a "business operating manual." It lets me capture processes so agents can spin up and just know how things work 'round here.
Models
Currently all agents use OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol and can spin up subagents using GPT-5.6 Terra. I was originally using Anthropic's Fable, but I got slapped with an API bill and realized Anthropic doesn't allow subscription usage for this setup, so I switched to GPT.
Frontier models are mostly interchangeable for this type of work. I probably don't need Sol and will adjust if needed. I'd love to use an open-weights model, but I have little incentive to switch when a $100 OpenAI subscription gets the job done. I'd even move to the $200 plan if needed.
Compute
All six run on a simple DigitalOcean Basic Droplet: 4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, and 160 GB of disk. I did have to upgrade from 4 gigs RAM because the box kept swapping to disk. I secure it with Tailscale and don't expose any public ports.
Coding
I mentioned dev-agent above, but I still use Claude Code with Fable, and Codex as a fallback, for 95% of my coding. I just feel at home in the terminal on my local machine, watching code changes and reasoning happen in real time. I know... so uncool.
Communication
Buzz
As I've talked about before, I'm working with Buzz, an open-source Slack alternative by Block with first-class agent support. It's early still, v0.5.9 at the time of writing, and you need to install the iPhone app manually, but it has a ton of promise. My vps-agent can create a new agent and connect it to Buzz as another member of the team in about 10 minutes.
All agents respond to DMs without a callout. In rooms, they require one (for example, @ea-agent). They can talk to each other, except for vps-agent, which only I can talk to.
Nostr
Buzz runs on the Nostr protocol, which is also pretty cool. It's small and open and defines its specifications through unfortunately-acronymed NIPs. At its core, NIP-01 defines a universal signed event, key-based authorship, WebSocket relays, and filterable real-time subscriptions. Buzz extends that into channels and operational events.
Agents are literally just keypairs. Any community can host its own relay, and new event types use the same signing and authentication model. I just think this is so cool.
Workflows
As I mention below, I've already set up webhooks that post messages into Buzz from external systems. Buzz can format the messages and call out specific users.
❯ buzz workflows list --channel...