4 October 2026
We ran a rival agent harness against our own — and the bug the test found was in the test
We wanted to know one thing: is our harness actually earning its keep, or would a general one do the job better on small local models?
Zerx talks to local models through a harness of its own — it hands the model a short list of workspace commands and then carries them out. Pi is a general-purpose agent harness, and a genuinely good one, which made it the right thing to measure ourselves against. So we ran both across five Ollama models on the same six file tasks.
On the smallest models, ours held up nicely. mistral:7b passed 1 of 6 under Pi and 3 under ours; granite3.3:8b managed 1 against 5. Then qwen3-coder:30b passed 6 of 6 under Pi and just 1 of 6 under ours — which looked like a clean win for Pi until we read the test instead of the score. Our benchmark had been handing that model a plain text-command protocol, while the product itself already knows it as a tool-calling model and sends it a tool schema. Giving it the surface it was built for took it from 1 to 5 and nearly closed the gap.
What we're taking from it: giving each model the protocol it was actually built for matters more than the harness you wrap around it. There is no single best surface for every model, and a purpose-built command still wins at the job it was designed for. The one clear win for the other harness turned out to be our own measurement error — not a difference between the tools.
28 September 2026
SnoreWatch — a snore alarm that never sends your audio anywhere
SnoreWatch listens for snoring and sounds an alarm the moment it hears it. It runs in the browser: open it, allow the microphone, press Start monitoring. There is nothing to install and no account to make.
The detection is on-device machine learning — YAMNet, the audio classifier, running locally. No audio leaves your machine because none of it is sent anywhere.
It wants a desktop or laptop browser, a microphone, the tab left open and the computer kept awake. It is not a medical device, and the EULA says so plainly.
There is also a free Android app: download the APK. It is a signed release build, and the native version keeps monitoring all night with the screen locked — which is the better way to use this overnight.
28 September 2026
The site is maintained by an agent, and the rules it works under are in the repository
This is worth saying plainly, because it explains the pace: much of Zerx is built by AI agent sessions that can reach the server this page is served from. They write the code, run the tests, and can publish what you are reading now.
What makes that safe enough to do is a short written rulebook in the repository rather than confidence in the agent. The whole test suite has to pass before anything is committed. Publishing to the live site and restarting services are production actions that are never run to find out whether something works. Credentials are never printed, and never committed. Those rules sit in the tree next to the code they govern, where anyone can read them.
It also means the honest answer to “who fixed this?” is often a machine, working from a report a person wrote — and the report is credited to the person who filed it.
26 September 2026
The bubbles demo runs in your browser
Zerx's first demo was a window of coloured bubbles, and until today the only way to see it was to install the app. It is now a page: open the demo, and it runs — no download, no install, nothing to configure.
It is the animation itself rather than a recording of one: twenty bubbles of drifting colour, each with a hue of its own, colliding and glancing off one another, with one of them in a hurry. It sizes itself to whatever it is opened on, so it works on a phone.
25 September 2026
Zerx 0.1.15 — it finds the gateway for you, and stops asking
A fresh install used to arrive with no gateway address at all, so the app had to ask you for one — and if you did not have it to hand, the only place to get it was whoever gave you Zerx. This build ships the address: the installer writes it into your settings on first run.
You can download it for Windows or for Linux.
Release notes
24 September 2026
Zerx 0.1.14 — LinkedIn, and a window that stays alive while it loads
Zerx now watches the comments on your LinkedIn posts and helps you answer them. Connect an account and the tab lists the comments waiting on your recent posts, newest first, with the post they belong to and the thread around the one you select.
You write the reply, and you press the button that sends it — nothing here posts on your behalf.
Release notes
23 September 2026
Zerx 0.1.13 — the first build that carries a signature
Every release before this one shipped unsigned, and Windows said so: “Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app from starting.” That reads as a warning about the software rather than as a statement that Microsoft has never seen it before, and it was the first thing a new person met.
This build is signed. The publisher on the signature is Autonomous Machines, and you can check it yourself under the installer's Properties → Digital Signatures.
Release notes
21 September 2026
Zerx 0.1.12 — the updater stops leaving things behind
Two things a finished update left on disk were never cleaned up, and both got worse with use. The first was a record of the last update, which the app reads at startup to tell you what happened while it was closed — nothing ever removed it, so a machine that had updated months earlier was still reading it at every launch.
Release notes