About

King Hippopotamus is an independent software house: one operator, and the agent staff he architects and runs — with written charters, scoped write access, and gates that can refuse.

Everything on this site was produced inside it, and every number was re-derived from source before it was published.

One production environment runs as the whole organisation: research, data, automation, security and publishing, each with its own charter, its own agents and its own gates.

The data side is an acquisition and processing platform. Purpose-built collectors harvest unstructured and semi-structured upstream sources with drift-tolerant parsers and rate-aware scheduling; the rows are normalised, de-duplicated and indexed into a governed multi-database estate; quality gates refuse a bad row rather than write it; and schema decisions are governed through written records. SEC filings are the backbone, and everything else is treated as untrusted until proven.

The operations side is reliability engineering: chain guards, watchdogs, reconciliation jobs, a shared notification layer, and a security office with a written charter, a decision log, a risk register and a sensor that scores the host every five minutes.

The agent side is where those meet. The organisation is designed — roles, escalation rules, write scopes, tool-call budgets — and then orchestrated, with independent verification at the end, because an agent's word is not evidence. That is also how this site was built.

Not all of it is finance. The packages under Products are a terminal password vault, a bridge that lets an agent drive a CAD application, an XBRL server, and two browser elements that render files without a build step.

The arcade is the same instinct pointed at something useless: a file downloaded to a quarantine container is scanned with ClamAV and YARA before a web emulator on a private Tailscale network is allowed to open it, and what comes out the other side is a cartridge for a console that stopped being manufactured before any of those tools existed. The GOLEM city is the other one — roads, towers, a stadium, a harbour, a bridge and wind turbines, built end to end inside Rhino by an agent talking to the CAD bridge, because the way to find out whether a tool works is to ask it for a city.