Last night, while I slept, an AI agent on my personal Claude account translated a chunk of an ancient corpus, committed it, and stopped. An hour later the next run read a handoff doc, rebuilt its memory from scratch, and kept going.
It did this all night. I was asleep — the most productive I've ever been while unconscious.
That loop is the whole engine of Hermitsh Press. An hourly cron job runs overnight: each run starts cold, reads where the last one left off, translates one chunk, commits, and stops. No warm cache, no central brain. The state is just git and a text file. It runs on my own Claude subscription, so the translation bill is zero.
Why this exists: I wanted to read Cicero. The free versions were behind paywalls, or stitched from a dozen translators in a dozen voices, or a century old, or buried on a website that actively fights you. So I'm building the thing I couldn't find: the complete works of the great authors, translated fresh from the original in one consistent voice, free to read with the source text right beside it.
Two weeks in, the receipts:
- 17 authors' complete works, live and buyable on Kindle right now
- 37 editions submitted to Google Play last night (pending their approval)
- ~890 visitors so far, mostly American
- 6 e-books sold
- 548 Kindle pages read
Six. So when I say Hermitsh Press is "funded by e-book sales," know that the sentence is doing a lot of optimistic work. But somebody, somewhere, read 548 pages of something I made, and I find that genuinely great.
A few things I learned the hard (read: expensive) way. I'm not really a programmer, more of a hacker — I get things to work without entirely knowing why. Keeping an AI coherent across an author's whole body of work was the real puzzle, so a lot of the job was teaching a cold-start agent how to remember who it was. I also spent two days building an elaborate "Control Center," admired it, and deleted the entire thing once it quietly became its own full-time job. You win some, you expensively delete some.
Here's the part I think is actually cool: there's no orchestrator, no giant context window, nobody babysitting it at 3am. One agent leaves a note for the next, and the canon gets a little more translated every hour, on its own.
The cron job runs again tonight, with another author in the queue. If you want to watch a one-person press translate the classics one overnight run at a time, that's the show.
— Al, Hermitsh Press
Hermitsh Press is a free, public-domain literature hub: the complete works of the great authors, translated fresh from the original in one consistent voice, with the source text facing the translation on the web. The corpus is queryable by AI, the translations are openly AI-made, and it's funded by the e-book editions (six sold so far — so, aspirationally). Read it free at hermitsh.ai.