Staðan á Visk-AI

Two paths: hand-roll a minimal agent loop on Railway (4–8 months to parity) or adopt Hermes, Nous Research's open-source agentic framework. We adopt — hand-roll stays as fallback if any of five conditions fails.

Axis	Why it matters	Hermes today
Code quality	A framework we can't patch fast becomes a liability.	166,420 stars · 4,802 merged PRs · 165k LoC in last 9 days.
Release discipline	Trading-adjacent code needs auditable releases.	Weekly tagged releases (vYYYY.M.D) · public release notes.
License	Clean IP posture for client deployments.	MIT verbatim · no CLA friction.
Security posture	The framework's threat model must match ours.	Explicit "OS is the only boundary" doctrine.
Supply chain	One bad dependency wipes a quarter of work.	Exact-pinned deps · documented quarantine response to the 2026-05-12 mistralai Mini Shai-Hulud incident.
Plugin surface	Our security controls live as plugins.	17 of 23 hardening requirements implementable as Hermes plugins, configs, or built-ins.
Community velocity	Bus-factor risk mitigated by inbound contributors.	215–295 community contributors per release cycle.

Fimm skilyrði

If any fail, we revert to hand-roll.

What Hermes does not ship

Hermes is a framework, not a finished platform. Four things we add ourselves:

What's missing	How we fill it
Dual-LLM separation	We add it as a plugin · 1–2 days
Database access boundary	Supabase provides it (Row-Level Security)
Network egress firewall	Envoy sidecar in the same Railway project — single highest-value control
Trading-grade audit trail	Separate Supabase project · append-only log

Deployment shape

Hermes does research and writes into a staging area. A separate supervised review process is the only path that promotes work to approved. Slack and the dashboard only read from approved. The research engine cannot bypass review.

Two-tier memory split

Lag 1 + sviðsetning fara í áfanga 1. Samsetningarþjónusta í áfanga 1.5. Rekstraraðili valdi þetta með orðunum „we can afford to take the time to ship this properly."

Runtime

Runtime	Railway CPU containers · Pro tier.
GPU	None. Railway does not offer GPU instances. All inference via API.
Primary inference	Nous Forge API (inference-api.nousresearch.com) · Hermes-4 family · OpenAI-compatible.
Non-Nous models	OpenRouter · zero-retention filter · provider failover · model pinning.

Geta í Stage 1

Why xAI Developer API and not "SuperGrok"

The xAI Developer API (api.x.ai) is the only Grok surface that legally permits programmatic access. Every consumer Grok variant is forbidden by xAI's terms for bot use.

Variant	Has API?	Use for bots?
SuperGrok consumer ($30/mo)	No	Forbidden
SuperGrok Heavy ($300/mo)	No	Forbidden
X Premium+ (includes Grok)	No	Forbidden
Grok Business ($30/seat)	No	Forbidden
xAI Developer API (api.x.ai)	Yes	This is the path

Hvað fáum við

• grok-4.3 — smartest current Grok. Analysis quality.
• grok-4-fast — cheaper variant. Cost optimization once volume is known.
• Server-side x_search tool — Grok-side built-in that fetches thread + quote context without a separate X Developer account. Killer feature for tweet analysis.
• OpenAI-compatible API — existing clients work, no special SDK.

Verkflæði — Slack /analyze

Same Grok account is the analysis engine; same research database is long-term memory. Reddit, HN, YouTube, RSS plug into the same table going forward.

Verkefni 1 — Slack /analyze tweet analysis

Component	Per call	10 / day	100 / day	1000 / day
Tweet extraction (X API v2)	$0.005 – $0.025	$1.50 – $7.50	$15 – $80	$150 – $800
Analysis (xAI grok-4.3 + x_search)	~$0.011	~$3	~$33	~$330
Slack delivery	$0	$0	$0	$0
Storage (free tier)	$0	$0	$0	$0
Subtotal	~$0.016 – $0.036	~$5 – $11	~$50 – $115	~$480 – $1,130

Verkefni 2 — Autoresearch loop (Hermes á Nous Forge)

Volume	Token budget	Monthly cost
Light (stage-1 baseline)	5M tokens / day	~$23
Heavy (multi-room or market-hot)	50M tokens / day	~$230

Nous rate-limit tier: Default (180 req/min) at launch. Ultra only when telemetry justifies. Every request instrumented from day one.

Verkefni 3 — Yfirferð (Claude / GPT um OpenRouter)

Volume	Cadence	Monthly cost
Light (event-driven, off-hours)	On artifact-ready signal	$50 – $150
Heavy (market-hours, 1–2 min cadence)	Continuous	$300 – $800

OpenRouter's 5.5% aggregation fee buys: single credential surface, per-request zero-retention filter, automatic provider failover, model-ID pinning that catches silent vendor swaps.

Verkefni 4 — Embeddings (Voyage-3-lite)

Volume	Token budget	Monthly cost
Light	0.5M tokens / day	~$10
Heavy	4M tokens / day	~$80

Finance-tuned, 1024-dim, cheapest in tier. Column dim pinned to 1024 → swap to self-hosted bge-large-en-v1.5 later without schema migration. OpenAI text-embedding-3-small held as DR fallback (1536-dim → re-embed required).

Samtals — Stage 1

Line	Light volume	Heavy volume
Nous Forge (Hermes-4)	$23	$230
OpenRouter (non-Nous mix)	$50 – $150	$300 – $800
Review session tokens	$50 – $100	$150 – $300
Railway runtime (+ Envoy)	$50 – $80	$80 – $150
Embeddings (Voyage-3-lite)	$10	$80
Database (existing)	$0	$25
Stage-1 total	$183 – $363 / mo	$865 – $1,585 / mo

Tweet analysis adds $50 – $115 / mo at 100 analyses/day on top.

1. Credentials deposited — xAI key · X API bearer · Slack signing secret + bot token · Nous Forge · OpenRouter · Voyage · DB role JWTs.
2. Database schema migration — new research schema, Row-Level Security forced on every table.
3. Egress sidecar deployed — Envoy · allowlist · default-deny.
4. Hermes loop deployed — Railway CPU service · staging-only write permissions.
5. Review process wired — scheduled sessions read staging, write promotions.
6. Dashboard read path — three curated views with realtime subscriptions on approved tables.
7. Governance daemon — flag table is single source of truth for pauses + incidents.
8. Audit pipeline — separate Supabase project · append-only action log.
9. Soft launch — operator-only Slack channel · 7–14 days · calibrate the review process.
10. General availability — end-client Slack access opens.

Tweet-analysis Slack workflow lands as a parallel sub-arc — five active phases · ~3.5 person-days · ready when step 1 credentials land.