Jim Stewart

I’ve run StewArt Media since 1999. Most of my career has been SEO, ecommerce, and helping businesses get found. Now I’m rebuilding the agency around AI agents: Hermes, Search Engineer, SKAW, and a lot of operator judgement. I post notes on: - SEO after Google - Shopify and product data - AI-operated agency workflows - what agents still get wrong - practical search/ecommerce lessons from real client work

Cancelled another Saas because Hermes built me a replacement. It was only a $50/month but the time suck using it because of the UX was huge. If you don't make it easy for my agent he will replace your saas/site for one that does.

It’s very simple Find a 3090 or two Get any mobo that supports 2 pcie x16 ports (at least x16x4 for lanes) Get a 1200W+ PSU Buy the cheapest ddr4 ram 64gb+ (you’re not using it anyways) Install Linux, vLLM, Llama.cpp, SGlang, tailscale Download any flavour of qwen 3.7 27b You are now localmaxxing

Kimi 2.6 you are the "bain marie of my life" . Kimi was keen as my main Hermes model - too keen. A lesson well learned. Fast tho :)

@MichaelHyatt @Hermes_agentAI @gregisenberg @AlexFinn @NetworkChuck Locally

I’m about to install @Hermes_agentAI. Should I install on local, dedicated machine or VPS? Why? cc: @gregisenberg, @AlexFinn, @NetworkChuck

@harpreetchatha_ I can’t believe what I just read.

Our AEO traffic converts way better than SEO traffic. Of course it does. We are comparing apples to oreos here. People are gaslighting you into thinking AEO / GEO has some magic attribution to it. Might as well say AI converts better than a billboard ad on highway 99. It’s true, but what’s the takeaway? What they really mean is “AI traffic converts better than non-branded informational SEO traffic.” A lot traditional SEO traffic was never designed to convert. The pages were built to get traffic (cause some tech companies have an obsession with growth and bs metrics, doesn’t matter what the growth is or impact on business, they just want to see numbers go up and to the right). Traffic was really easy to game and achieve growth. - “what is” - “topic x explained” - “how to do y” - “10 examples of x” AI systems reduce clicks, they strip out the bullshit so you’re getting less clicks to the content types above. By the time traffic gets to you, naturally it’s of a higher intent. Lower traffic + higher intent traffic = better conversion rates. A more nuanced comparison would be AI conversions vs organic BOFU or branded conversions. We don’t see this cause most marketers haven’t built out their attribution models. They don’t want to either, because the data will go against the popular narrative around how AI is an amazing growth channel (more on this later in ep. 2).

.@NetworkChuck's overview of what makes Hermes Agent unique is really well done. He's clearly been a power user and done his homework in this video. Highly recommended if trying to decide if you should try Hermes Agent!

@andyhtran_ @OmarAbcXyz123 @Scobleizer Mbp m3 . I don’t time it but it’s pretty quick

@jimboot @OmarAbcXyz123 @Scobleizer Do you host hermes on a mac mini or VPS? How insanely fast is insanelyfastwhisper your audio files?

Wispr Flow on Mac was truly a great invention. It literally saves me multiple hours every single day because every new feature I build starts with a 5 minute prompt to Claude that would have been 20 minutes of typing. Everyone that's tried it can't go back. But the same is not true for iPhone. There's so much friction having to switch keyboards to Wispr every time you want to say something and then switch keyboards back to the Apple one every time I want to edit. That's why we built the Blue (YC S25) Smart Dictation Keyboard for iPhone! It gives you a 4x speedup when you can speak and an (almost) Apple-level keyboard when you can't, completely eliminating the switching friction. Blue on iPhone is stickier than any product I've ever worked on while I was at Google. People don't use it 3 days a week one time for 2 minutes. They use it 100 times a day. 80% of their typing is dictation. They tell me Blue has changed their life and they can't see themselves ever going back.

@hjcharlesworth This sounds awesome. Well done mate.

We think going incredibly deep and building a great team with a handful of our most trusted and important customers is how we win, stay on the frontier and build a great business. If you're a builder and want to have the most amount of skin in the game doing incredibly hard things on the frontier. Come join us.

@DJ_CURFEW @its_joeyp Using the MCP with Hermes is a lot better than me doing it :)

@its_joeyp We have MCP, was there an issue with allowlist in openclaw? developer.clickup.com/docs/connect-a… Webhooks - are you looking for incoming/outgoing or both?

Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it's ever been. So I think it's important to be direct about what I'm seeing and why. First, I made this decision and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it. Second, this wasn't about cutting costs. Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We'll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you'll be paid outside of traditional bands. Most importantly, I have the deepest gratitude for those affected. We're doing this from a position of strength specifically so we can take care of people properly. Everyone affected receives a package aimed at honoring their contributions and easing the transition. I only see two options: wait for this to play out gradually in the market or be honest about what I'm seeing and act proactively. THE 100X ORGANIZATION The primary change is that we're restructuring around what I call 100x org. The goal is 100x output. The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago. Incremental improvements to existing systems won't get us there. We need new ones. That means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken. The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn't. Many of the workflows of today, if left unchanged, create bottlenecks in AI systems. These roles will evolve. But waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now. The 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people - infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working. THE BUILDERS, AGENT MANAGERS, AND FRONT-LINERS — THE BUILDERS: 10X ENGINEERS I don't think most companies have internalized what's actually happening with AI in engineering. The common narrative is that AI makes all engineers more productive. That may be true in isolation, but at an organization level - that is the farthest thing from reality. Here's what we've validated recently at ClickUp: the great engineers, the ones who can orchestrate, architect, and review, are becoming 100x engineers. They're not writing code. They're directing agents that write code. The skill is judgment. AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down. Think about it - the bottlenecks are (1) orchestration - telling AI what to do, and (2) reviewing - what AI did. Everything is leapfrogged and no longer needed. So who do you want orchestrating and reviewing code? And how do you want your best engineers to spend their time? If your best engineers are spending time reviewing other people's code, then this is inherently an inefficient bottleneck. These engineers can review their agent's code much faster than reviewing human code. The new world is about enabling your 10x engineers to become 100x. The wrong strategy is to push every engineer to use infinite tokens. Companies doing this are celebrating 500% more pull requests. But customer outcomes don't match the volume of code being generated. I call this the great reckoning of AI coding, and every company will face this soon if not already. More code is just another bottleneck to the best engineers, and ultimately to your company's impact as well. — THE BUILDERS: 10X PRODUCT MANAGERS Product management and design roles are merging. Designers that have customer focus, become more like product managers. And product managers that have intuition for UX become more like designers. The bottleneck of user research is gone. It takes us just one mention of an agent to kickoff research and analyze results. The bottleneck of product <> design iteration is also gone. The product builder iterates on their own, along with agents and skills that ensure alignment with quality and strategy. Also controversial today - I believe that the wrong strategy is to have your PMs shipping code - that just introduces another bottleneck that the best engineers will waste their time on. To be clear, PMs should be coding but they should do this in a playground to iterate, validate, and scope. That code should not go to production. Everything outside of managing systems, orchestrating AI, and reviewing output becomes a bottleneck. That's why the other roles that are critical along with these are the systems managers (to reduce bottlenecks) along with a bottleneck you can't replace - customer meeting time. — THE SYSTEM MANAGERS Ironically, the people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job. They become owners of the AI systems - agent managers. We have many examples of these people at ClickUp. The underlying systems in which we operate are absolutely critical to get right. I think most companies are delusional to think they can iterate on existing systems and compete in this new world. You must create enough disruption so that old systems are deprecated entirely. If there's any definition for 'AI native' that's what it is. — THE FRONT-LINERS In a world that will become saturated with AI communication, the human touch will matter more than anything to customers. This is a bottleneck that you shouldn't replace - even when agents are high enough quality to do video meetings. One-on-one meeting time with customers is something that shouldn't be automated. The systems around the meetings should be - so that front-liners spend nearly 100% of their time with customers. REWARDING 100X IMPACT In a world where companies are able to do so much more with less, where does that excess money go? In our case, much of the savings in this new operating model will flow directly back to those that enabled it. We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can't afford to lose them. You should aim to retain these employees for decades. The context they have and their ability to efficiently orchestrate and review will be nearly impossible to replace. Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We're introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems. THE FUTURE Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next. The future is not fewer people. It's different work, new roles, and better rewards for those who embrace it. We're already seeing entirely new roles emerge, like Agent Managers, that didn't exist a year ago. ClickUp is positioning to lead this shift, not just internally, but for our customers too. I've never been more certain about where we're headed.

@jimstewartson You are no son of mine

I’m getting tired of “experts” like this misunderstanding what they’re looking at. LLMs are giant databases of stuff HUMAN BEINGS have done. They are the EXHAUST of humanity. Prompts are database queries into EXISTING DATA. It’s a fuzzy search engine, not intelligence.

@tomfgoodwin Build an agent

All I want to know is what are these people making. That’s all. Maybe it’s taking a while but I’m not seeing anything that needs to exist.

@eevblog Watch the series first then the movie Serenity. They'll love it.

@jimboot No

Looking for a new series to watch after all the Stargate's and I told the family the 1978 Battlestar Galactica was good. They didn't last half way through the first episode before declaring NOPE. Mrs EEVblog said it's cardboard acting, no excitement, no emotion. Harsh.

i have become middle manager orchestrator of agents

Thanks Barry. I find this whole SEO/GEO debate really blinkered and siloed. John makes a very good point. If your site or app does not make it easy for my agent to navigate and grok it, I'm not using it. SEOs don't care about what happens to the traffic when it hits the site it seems. I have not seen one article mentioning impact on client revenue - just bemoaning organic traffic numbers. Newsflash - business owners want to direct resources to where they will get the the most return. I see our job as helping them make that decision - but if all you have in your toolkit is "muh backlinks" that ain't gonna cut it.

Google's @johnmu comments more about SEO and AI markdown files and llms.txt seroundtable.com/google-adds-ma…

@github Just to be clear: Microsoft’s GitHub was compromised when a Microsoft developer using Microsoft VSCode installed a rogue extension from Microsoft’s VSCode extension library, which is moderated and hosted by Microsoft. I guess I’ll be reevaluating my life choices.

Shopify is now redirecting llms.txt to agents.md . Yay

@elygiux No one relies on llms.txt

We noticed that /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt started redirecting to /agents.md on all Shopify stores and now It's not possible to create /llms.txt path on Shopify or create a redirect to a proxy url. We have thousands of merchants relying on llms.txt and merchants do not want the redirect to agents.md community.shopify.dev/t/llms-txt-and… Can this be fixed/undone or a solution provided ? cc @liam_at_shopify @kinngh @eytanseidman @ShopifyDevs

it’s in gemini, just create it in ai studio. oh, that’s for your personal google one account. for workspace you need gemini business. no, not gemini advanced, that’s ai pro now. unless you need ai ultra. oh agents? you do that in spark actually. no, not gemini api managed agents, that’s different. for coding use jules. unless you mean the agentic ide, that’s antigravity. no, that’s the old antigravity, download the new one. actually gemini cli is being deprecated, use antigravity cli. no the flash model is smarter than the pro model. unless you need pro. if it’s video, use flow. no, flow uses veo. no, nano banana is images. actually that’s in gemini now. unless you’re in search, then it’s ai mode. no, research is notebooklm. anyway it’s all very simple.