A living thesis, rebuilt every couple of days by a machine that reads while you sleep.
This is an orientation to the autonomous "researcher" that runs on Jed’s Hermes agent. On a schedule (a cron job), it goes out, reads new sources, and rewrites its understanding of one question: what is the real economy of building on the Moon? Each run is a cycle. Below, every cycle is condensed so you can skim the arc, dive where it’s interesting, and leave notes — without reading 300 pages of raw output.
18cycles
2026-06-07 → 2026-07-13date range
269sources
80entities tracked
34hypotheses
47opportunities
63taxonomy classes
◆The thesis it is converging on
Regolith is not dirt; it is the first native material culture of an off-world civilization. Infrastructure is sculpture, protocol, ritual, market substrate, and civilization-forming media. Middleware is the protocol layer where autonomy, mobility, payload interchange, and maintenance become scarce lunar infrastructure.
How the system actually works
A scheduled job on the Mac mini wakes a research agent every ~2 days. Each run it: pulls fresh sources, compares them against everything it already believes, updates a structured "state" (entities, hypotheses, opportunities, a taxonomy), writes a dated cycle report, and — crucially — critiques its own process to aim the next run better. Nothing is thrown away; each cycle starts from the last one’s conclusions. That is the "recursive" part: the output feeds the next input, so understanding compounds instead of resetting.
Every cycle report follows the same 13-part shape, which is why they’re easy to compare:
1New discoveries
2Strongest signals
3Maintenance cash-flow layer
4First lunar middleware stack
5New people / orgs
6Funding & competitions
7Technology update
8Art-history connection
9Project concept
10Patron target
11Updated thesis
12Next search directions
13Recursive self-improvement
◆Plain-language glossary
Regolith
The loose dust and broken rock covering the Moon’s surface. This system treats it not as dirt but as the first native building material of an off-world civilization.
Middleware
The connective protocol layer — autonomy, mobility, payload interchange, docking, data — that lets separate lunar machines and services work together. The scarce, high-value infrastructure.
Maintenance cash-flow layer
The idea that servicing, repairing and keeping machines alive on the Moon is a recurring-revenue business, not a one-off. Where near-term money actually flows.
Patron / patronage
Who would fund or champion this — agencies, primes, foundations, collectors — modeled like art patronage, since the thesis frames infrastructure as culture.
Taxonomy classes
The categories the agent has invented to file what it finds. 63 so far — a sign the system is organizing knowledge, not just collecting links.
Hypotheses & opportunities
Testable claims the agent is forming (34) and concrete openings it has spotted (47) — funding calls, gaps, projects.
Recursive self-improvement
Each cycle ends by critiquing its own process and setting better search directions for the next run — the loop that makes the system compound.
ISRU / oxygen
In-Situ Resource Utilization: making fuel, oxygen and materials from local regolith instead of shipping them from Earth.