Romit Raj

Sixteen gigabytes and an agent that wanted ten

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My agent froze my home server for fifteen minutes while rendering a video, and the kernel killed two things that were not the culprit. With RAM prices doubled, this is the break, learn, fix and monitor version: how I found it, what I capped, and how I watch it now.

Pushed, not poured: the tiny holes in an espresso machine

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago I got stuck on what I thought was a simple question. When you pull a shot of espresso, the hot water comes out of a metal plate full of small holes, the shower screen, and lands on the coffee as a gentle, even rain. How does water get through holes that small so neatly? I had a picture in my head for this: a bathroom shower, water sitting up top, gravity doing the work, the holes letting it dribble through. Both halves of that picture were wrong, and the real answer is a lot more interesting.

SB 690 explainer: one door closes, two stay open

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

California took the most common website-tracking lawsuit away from private plaintiffs. What closed, what stayed open, and what the retroactivity clause does to the cases already in court.

What my agent remembers, and where it keeps it

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ted Lasso recommends being a goldfish. It is, he says, the happiest animal alive: it forgets everything in ten seconds and moves on. My agent took that advice. Hermes is a goldfish — every conversation starts from zero, and anything it “knows” about me is either written into the prompt or fetched from somewhere else. And for a while I was one too: it would ask me again about things we had settled a week ago, and I would explain them again, from the beginning. The difference between us is that I could do something about it. So I spent a few weeks giving it a memory. We are goldfish, the agent and I, but only one of us was going to stay that way. This is what I learned about the options, what each of them actually means, and the architecture I ended up with.

Metering what my Hermes agent spends

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My agent, Hermes, talks to me on a Matrix server I run myself. Self-hosting the chat window was a privacy decision before it was anything else, and that setup is a post for another day. What matters here: an agent that chats all day needs a meter. So every LLM call it makes goes through a proxy I wrote — and “wrote” deserves an asterisk, because I’m a lawyer. An LLM helps me code things out; I mostly argue with it until it works. One SQLite file tells me what it spent today.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Romit Raj. I trained as a lawyer and now work as a product manager at a privacy company. Most of my day goes to one question: what does the law say a website may do with your data, and what does it actually do. My job is the gap between those two answers.

Away from work I run a home server that hosts half the tools I use daily, and I break it often enough to have opinions. This site is where I write those experiments down: what I tried, what failed, what I’d do differently. No analytics on these pages, no trackers, no comments. Just the posts.