We are a father and son who build Hermes AI (artificial intelligence) agents for a living. Rolf is the engineer. Grant is the software developer. Neither of us is a founder, CEO (chief executive officer), or anything else that ends in a five-letter title. We are the people who do the work.

Rolf Versluis: engineer

Alpharetta, Georgia. I run a farm in Chatsworth, a small consulting practice in north Georgia, and four Hermes agents that I use for both.

I trained as an electrical engineer, then picked up a postgraduate degree in nuclear engineering. I worked as a data network and network security engineer at a company I co-founded, then built and sold another company in the IT (information technology) consulting space. After that I helped start Horizen, a public blockchain. I have owned a pine plantation, a few small businesses, and the patience to sit through the parts of a project other people skip.

For the last ten years I have been building and using AI agents. The last eight months I have been doing it on Hermes, an open-source agent harness. The agents I run now write code, install software, manage my farm surveillance, run my businesses, and do research while I am driving.

Title: engineer. That is what I call myself. The other degrees and the MBA (master of business administration) and the rest are real, but they are not what I lead with.

Grant Versluis: software developer

Chattanooga, Tennessee. Grant does the software side of the practice. He is the one writing the agents, building the integrations, debugging the deploys.

Grant has a degree in computer science. He is a software developer. That is what he calls himself, and that is what he does.

What we have built

A few of the projects you can see in the wild:

• github.com/blockops1/ai_camera_monitor: A real-time identification system for a farm. Reolink camera fires a webhook on motion, the agent pulls the images, classifies what is moving, and sends a Telegram alert with a picture. No false positives. MIT-licensed. Public repo.
• crestvieworchards.com: A pasture-raised chicken farm store in north Georgia. Medusa (an open-source e-commerce platform) backend, Next.js storefront, Stripe (an online payment processor) payments, Apple Pay, scheduled pickup days. Built end-to-end by a Hermes agent over a few months. I did the design calls. The agent did most of the implementation.
• The wooden sword audiobook: A narration pipeline that turns a chapter of an audiobook into a finished video with captions and a Ken Burns (slow zoom and pan over a still image) scene per line. Faster-whisper transcription, Chatterbox TTS (text-to-speech, software that converts text into spoken audio) voice cloning, ASS (Advanced SubStation Alpha, a subtitle file format with styling) caption burn-in. Open source, with scripts.
• Substack newsletter: rolfversluis.substack.com. Four years of writing about what I have learned. AI agents, small business, leadership lessons from running a US Navy submarine. The recent posts are about building Hermes agents; the older posts are about what I learned before AI was on my radar.

How we work together

When a new engagement comes in, I (Rolf) take the first call. I find the loop that is eating your week. I describe what an agent could do with it. If we agree the work is real, Grant picks up the technical side. He sets up the agent harness, installs the MCPs (Model Context Protocol adapters) you need, writes the skill that automates the loop, tests it on your real environment.

We are not a large firm. We do not subcontract. The two of us do the work.

What we will not do

• We will not promise that an AI agent will replace your staff. The agent takes the loops. Your people do the work that requires judgment and relationships.
• We will not build a custom model for you. Hermes is open-source. We use what is already there. If your problem requires a custom model, you have a problem we are not the right fit for.
• We will not take an engagement where the data is too sensitive to leave your hardware and you do not have hardware to run the agent on. Local-first is the whole reason to bother with an agent. If you cannot run it locally, the SaaS (software as a service) vendors are a better fit.

How to start

The front door is the $99 consultation on the home page. The free 15 minute call is for figuring out whether the consultation is worth your $99.