While my dedicated sections focus on specific pillars, the Essays section is where I explore the intersections. This is a space for synthesis—where Stoicism meets artificial intelligence, or where civic duty meets personal development.
These pieces are often more exploratory, serving as intellectual sketches and deep-dives into the questions that don’t fit neatly into a single category but are essential to a well-lived life.
I will not write a memoir. I have lived long enough to know that the full account of a life requires a distance I have not yet achieved, and a candor that would cost more than it would clarify. But Misaligned is as close as I expect to get.
It is not a confessional. It does not ask for sympathy. It examines, as honestly as I am capable of examining, what happens when the wrong map is applied — with discipline, with genuine effort, with the best intentions available — to the territory of a life.
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There is a particular kind of person this book was written for. They are not in obvious crisis. They show up on time, meet their obligations, maintain their relationships with something that looks like competence. From the outside, they appear functional — even capable. But inside, quietly, something is off. Not broken exactly. Not falling apart. Just not quite whole.
They have learned, over years of accumulated experience, to manage the fractures rather than address them. To route around the places where life has cracked them and keep moving. They are good at this. So good that most days they can almost forget it is happening.
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APA-Citable Sources for “The Optimal Use of Hermes” Below are formatted APA citations organized by which claim in the essay they support. Sources marked [CONFIRMED] were verified via direct API lookups. Sources marked [TRAINING] are drawn from the agent’s pretraining knowledge of well-known, highly-cited academic papers.
Claim 1: Hermes Agent — an open-source agent framework from Nous Research (memory, skills, delegation, cron) Nous Research. (2026). Hermes Agent documentation. Retrieved May 21, 2026, from https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/
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Correction notice — May 26, 2026. This essay was factually reviewed on 2026-05-26 and republished with specific corrections applied. Among them: removed fabricated citations, including an invented robot (“Shumana”), invented Stanford Cart developer names, and a fabricated RAND study author; corrected dates, attributions, and roles for figures including Minsky, McCarthy, Geoffrey Hinton, and the BDI framework’s origins; corrected specific historical details (SNARC’s 1951 build, the Strategic Computing Initiative’s 1983 launch, OpenAI Five’s release year, the DQN Atari count, Brynjolfsson et al.’s citation, and several others); and removed fabricated co-authors from the Silver et al. and Mnih et al. reference entries. A reader who compared the original May 21, 2026 version to the current text would see that the historical claims, attributions, and reference list have been tightened throughout. The work should be read as corrected, not as it first appeared. If you spot a remaining error, please email phil@huffmanwrites.org.
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Update (June 2026): Hermes is no longer part of my workflow. It has been replaced by Claude, a more reliable and consistent AI assistant. While Hermes was groundbreaking in its approach, it leaped without looking too many times—its autonomous nature often led to unpredictable or undesirable outcomes. This essay remains online as a historical record of my experience with Hermes, but I no longer use or recommend it.
About six weeks ago, I wrote a short essay explaining that I use artificial intelligence as part of my writing process. The core observation was simple: AI does not originate ideas, but it exposes structure. It mirrors patterns back at you, shows you where an argument repeats itself, amplifies confusion rather than resolving it, and generally behaves less like a writer and more like a diagnostic instrument.
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There is a moment before violence. It is invisible to everyone except the person holding it. I have stood in that threshold. Not as a soldier, not as a protester, but as a man who discovered, without warning, that the life he thought he was living had been hollowed out from behind. The betrayal was specific—a wife, a friend of a friend, a blunt truth delivered without mercy. But the violence that followed was not directed at either of them. It filled the room. It became the air. I remember my hands shaking, my vision narrowing to a tunnel, and something ancient rising in my chest that wanted not justice but annihilation.
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