Nine scheduled AI agents, 65 cron jobs, and a plain script watchdog on a VPS

I run nine AI agents on one VPS, each named after its job, with 65 scheduled tasks between them. Most of those tasks never call a model. This is for anyone who wants AI working in the background. 1. One agent per job, not one for everything. Each has its own directory and credentials file, so revoking a compromised one costs one service, not the estate. 2. Write the work as a schedule, not a prompt, using five field cron. "0 3 * * *" backs the fleet up, "0 6 * * *" runs the security scan, and "0 23 * * *" mines the day's session logs. Interval jobs cover the rest, every 15 minutes for the watchdog. 3. Pick the delivery target at creation time: a Discord channel, email, or a local file. Mine go to a channel per officer, so a failure is a message I see and a quiet job is one I stop noticing. 4. Attach a skill instead of pasting a paragraph. Each job loads a skill file with the procedure, pitfalls and exact commands, kept in version control instead of a prompt I edit by accident. 5. Use a plain script when the answer is deterministic. My watchdog is a shell script on a 15 minute interval that checks disk, memory and failed units and pipes the result to the channel. It has run 13,752 times with no tokens and no model. 6. Put a guard in front of the tools. A hook runs before every tool call and refuses secrets in a chat message, deletes without approval, and invites accepted on my behalf. 7. Count your jobs monthly. I have 85 defined and 65 enabled. A disabled job is a plan; an enabled job is a contract that should be able to say what it can reach. The boring half of running a small estate happens without me, the interesting half still gets my attention, and it runs on a VPS I already paid for. The skills are public at github.com/ciberjohn/Hermes-Skills. The agents were never the expensive part. My attention was.