brumalia-studiosai-agentsbuilding-in-public2 min read

Day Zero: Building in Public with AI Agents

23 May 2025

This is day zero.

I've been meaning to write publicly about what I'm building for a while. The usual excuses — not enough time, site's not ready, I'll do it properly when there's something worth showing. That's just procrastination with a project management hat on.

So here's the deal: I'm going to document this journey in real time, starting now, before there's anything polished to show.

What is this, exactly?

I'm Matty. IT Manager at a fashion and retail group by day, and in the gaps between meetings, I'm building Brumalia Studios — an AI-first agency. Websites, apps, automations, and AI agent systems, starting with friends and family and aiming for proper paying clients within the year.

The name comes from Brumalia — the ancient Roman winter solstice festival. The shortest day. The moment darkness is at its deepest, right before the light starts coming back. It felt right.

The tools I'm learning

The main thing I'm working with right now is Hermes — a self-hosted AI agent system that I'm running on a private VPS. It's connected to Telegram, has a brain (knowledge base), can run automations, schedule tasks, write code. It's the backbone of how I'm working.

Alongside that: Claude Code on my laptop for actual software development, n8n for automation workflows, and Supabase + Vercel + Next.js for web projects.

This site itself is the first proper build. Next.js 15, TypeScript, Tailwind. Nothing fancy — just something that looks right and gives me a place to write.

What I'm actually building

In rough priority order:

  1. This site — needed a base first
  2. HTAFC Women's Analysis Tool — football analytics for Huddersfield Town AFC Women's team. This might become a real product.
  3. Personal Finance App — AI-powered money management. Smart categorisation, plain-English insights.
  4. Polyurethane Lead Gen App — my wife's business. Needs research first.

Why write about it?

Partly accountability. Partly because when I was starting, I couldn't find many honest accounts of someone actually learning this stuff from scratch — not founders who are already experts, not developers who learned AI on top of years of experience, but someone figuring it out while also holding down a real job.

If that's useful to one person, it's worth doing.

More soon.