Essays

The fountain pen is one of the few tools in daily life that can be described, without exaggeration, as a civilizational artifact. It sits at the intersection of engineering and culture, precision and ritual, the mechanical and the expressive. And yet, for most of its history, the story of the fountain pen has been told primarily as a Western narrative — a procession of inventors and patents moving from Paris to New York — with the fuller, stranger, more interesting story left largely untold. That story involves two countries that approached the same instrument from profoundly different directions and produced two of the most distinctive pen-making traditions in the world: Germany and Japan. ...

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. ...

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/ ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

I was ready to do something drastic. My machine had been running hot for weeks. Disk usage climbing, performance lagging, the kind of quiet degradation that starts as inconvenience and ends as crisis. I had installed AnythingLLM to test it, decided it wasn’t ready, uninstalled it — and yet the space never came back. The numbers didn’t lie. Something was eating my disk, and I couldn’t see it. The easy answer was staring at me: clean install. Wipe the whole system, start fresh, rebuild from zero. It’s the digital equivalent of the scorched-earth impulse — the one that says, if I can’t understand the problem, I’ll eliminate the conditions that produced it. I’ve done it before. Most of us have. It feels like control. It feels like decisiveness. It is almost always a confession that we have failed to understand what we are actually dealing with. ...

I did not set out to use artificial intelligence as part of my writing process. Like most things in my work, it began as a practical response to a problem. I was trying to clarify an idea—tighten an argument that felt structurally sound but poorly expressed. The tool I was using responded with something unexpected: not just a rephrasing, but a reframing. It wasn’t always correct. Often it wasn’t. But it forced a different question: ...

Eight books, with another on the way. Different subjects, different tones — but the same underlying preoccupations: clarity, proportion, and the work of living well. Browse below, and if something catches your attention, the cover image will take you to Amazon. Unstuck Unstuck is not a gentle book. It is a direct challenge to the habits of delay, justification, and self-deception that keep capable people from moving forward. Drawing on Stoic discipline and decades of lived experience, it argues that most obstacles are not external — they are internal negotiations we have learned to accept. ...

Stoic Backgammon A Profitable Pastime Executive Summary Stoic Backgammon treats the ancient game as a practice of philosophy—not metaphorically, but literally. Each chapter pairs a phase of play with a Stoic principle, demonstrating that the board enforces what the Enchiridion describes: some things are up to us, others are not. The dice are not; the move is. The core message: the right response to uncertainty is not prediction but character. ...