Build City x NEAR Legion: Building Agents with Folders Ep. 3

​Last time, Claude Code and Codex ran the folder that builds this stream. This time we hand that same folder to Hermes, an open-source agent running on NEAR AI Cloud private inference, and see whether it still works.

​Same Folder, New Brain • ICM on NEAR AI Cloud • Mapping a Real Business

​🧠 Part 1: ICM in 60 Seconds A quick catch-up for anyone new to Interpretable Context Methodology (Jake Van Clief & David McDermott): folders and plain text files as agent architecture.

​We’ll explore:

​numbered folders as steps, markdown as instructions, a person reviewing in between what this folder built in Ep. 2 when ICM fits, and when it doesn’t 🔐 Part 2: Live: Same Folder, Three Agents The ICM paper’s authors only tested Claude models. Today we run a small live test on an open-weight model.

​We’ll explore:

​what NEAR AI Cloud private inference is: open models running in sealed hardware, with a signed proof for each answer what “private” covers and what it doesn’t the same question on Claude Code, Codex and Hermes + NEAR, side by side Hermes + NEAR doing a real job in the folder 🗺️ Part 3: Preview: Map the Real Process First Before you build anything for a business, you map how the work actually runs. We’ll show how we plan to do that with a mortgage broker in the coming episodes.

​📅 Saturday, October 24 ⏰ 10 AM to 12 PM ET 🌐 Virtual.

​What to bring: nothing required. If you want to follow along, have any AI agent that can read files (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Hermes).

​Hosted by Tony and Nav. Want to go deeper on ICM? Check out Jake Van Clief’s free Clief Notes community on Skool.

​Hosted by NEAR Legion City Node: Build City