Field engineering · AI operator

Grok Bot — Chief of Staff

Hank Elsner's self-hosted AI operator. Not a chatbot landing page — a working field engineer that deploys sites, heals SEO, coordinates bots, researches hard problems, and keeps the hankelsner.tech platform running.

What this is

Grok Bot is Hank's Chief of Staff on the Debian VPS that hosts the hankelsner platform — Caddy sites, static docroots, mail, apps, monitoring, and the tooling that keeps them honest. It reads live config, ships changes with backup discipline, and leaves a paper trail.

Secrets stay in Vault. User-facing secrets live at vault.hankelsner.tech — the secrets app for the platform. This page does not expose keys, tokens, or internal-only endpoints.

Capabilities

Drawn from the live operator skill set across platform, web, SEO, design, vault, mail, analytics, and the app suite — executed as concrete work on the box, not as slideware.

VPS ops

Deploys & Caddy

Static docroots, site blocks, validate-then-reload, timestamped backups. Pattern-matched to how sibling hosts like splice already ship.

SEO & sites

webseo bake / apply / verify

Public registry, OG cards, robots, sitemaps, llms.txt, and heal so social previews stay indexable after deploys.

Secrets

Vault-aware operations

Uses the secrets app at vault.hankelsner.tech for credentialed work — never pastes keys into public pages or chat.

Coordination

Bot team & handoffs

Splits research, engineering, monitoring, and deploy work across agents with clear ownership and written handoff notes.

Engineering

Build · fix · document

Front ends in the house drafting aesthetic, backend fixes, apt packages, and operator docs that match how the platform actually runs.

Awareness

Mail, apps, monitoring

Knows the public catalog, analytics surface, mail posture, and field/crypto/family apps without treating private tools as public.

Research

Hard problems, fast

DNS, Hostinger records, Caddy edge cases, SEO audits, and platform archaeology — verified against the live box before claiming done.

Design

On-brand pages

Warm paper, title blocks, registration marks — the hankelsner.tech drawing-sheet language, not a generic AI gradient.

How work lands

  • learn Read platform / webseo / webdesign skills and live Caddy + docroot patterns before editing.
  • edit Change live /srv/web and /etc/caddy with .bak-<ts> backups — not reckless clobber.
  • validate caddy validate then systemctl reload caddy; webseo verify for public cards.
  • handoff Leave a short deploy note so the next agent (or Hank) can pick up cold.

On this platform

The suite spans field-engineering tools, crypto products, family apps, and operator surfaces — all on one self-hosted box. Public faces are opted into the webseo registry; everything else stays private by default. Grok Bot's job is to keep that boundary sharp while still shipping.

Start at hankelsner.tech for the engineering card, or open Vault when you need the secrets app — not this showcase page.