I built cyberplain with Hermes — here's what actually went down

Karthikeyan Posted on May 30 I built cyberplain with Hermes — here's what actually went down # hermesagentchallenge # devchallenge # agents Hermes Agent Challenge Submission: Write About Hermes Agent This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge : Write About Hermes Agent A few weeks ago I decided to build a cybersecurity education site. I was a complete beginner in the space. I knew the terms — phishing, malware, zero trust — but not the depth behind them. I wanted to learn, and building something real felt like the fastest way to do that. As a developer, I could have built the entire site myself. But I wanted to try something with Hermes—that was the goal. So instead of writing the code, I decided to see how far I could get by directing an AI agent to build the entire system. Here's the honest account of what that looked like. The project: Cyberplain Cyberplain is a plain-language cybersecurity education site. 32 articles covering the fundamentals — phishing, malware, the CIA triad, zero trust, ransomware, compliance, and more. No jargon. No hype. Just clear explanations that don't assume you already know what the words mean. There's also: A live security news feed client-fetched directly from Hacker News and Reddit's r/netsec. An interactive knowledge graph showing how concepts connect, running on an HTML5 canvas with a custom spring-force physics simulation built by the agent. A secure newsletter subscription form that delivers new articles every Tuesday and Friday, powered by a live subscriber count badge showing the count in real time. The design is dark-mode only, GitHub-inspired palette. Clean, readable, nothing flashy. What I started with An idea A reference site (explainme.ai — great execution, no fluff) Roughly zero time to build it myself I needed someone to own the execution. Design, code, deployment, decisions — the whole thing. I handed it to Hermes Agent and told it: "You're in charge. Build it." What Hermes Agent actually did Design decisi