A Seneschal for the Research Computing Desk

Since September 2026 one AI agent, Hermes, has done most of the drafting behind my job as Director of Research Computing at UC Riverside. I call it my seneschal, the old word for a steward who ran a household in the owner's name and answered to the owner. It drafts email, ticket notes and ledger entries. I approve the exact text before anything leaves. Two of my tools enforce that approval in code. On the path I use most, it is a written rule the agent follows. On 28 October 2026 the work ledger picked up 15 entries. Eleven record an email that went out after I approved the text. In nine of those the agent says it then found the message in my Sent folder, which is the agent checking itself. None of the 11 mentions the code-enforced composer. I trust the setup because of the approval step and the log, and the log is less complete than I would like. Field Notes technical report. Web edition: https://charles-forsyth.github.io/papers/2026-10-29-a-seneschal-for-the-research-computing-desk.html. This record holds the PDF (ACM sigconf, PDF/A-2b) and the LaTeX source.