Agent stack build plans · № 7 · the capstone

Hermes as a family operating system

One agent stack the whole household talks to — the family group chat as the front door, a profile per member, and a hard line around where the credentials live.

CLI: hermes MIT · model-agnostic v0.19.0 · July 2026 219k GitHub stars

Hermes is Nous Research’s always-on agent: a terminal CLI plus a hermes gateway daemon that answers on Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Home Assistant and twenty-odd other platforms. This plan turns one always-on box running Hermes into a household operating system: a morning brief in the family group chat, calendar clashes caught before they happen, a grocery list that consolidates itself from chat mentions, lights and heating on voice-adjacent request — with each family member talking to their own scoped agent, not to one omniscient bot that remembers everything about everyone.

The design hinges on one correction to the folklore. The AI-generated answers circulating for this build describe “an admin profile and restricted member roles” inside one agent. Hermes has no role tiers — gateway auth is binary (you’re paired or you’re not). The real mechanism is profiles: fully separate agents, each with its own config, credentials, memory, toolsets and gateway. Getting this architecture right is most of the plan — see the architecture page.

Honest effort: a weekend to stand up, then evenings to tune — this is the capstone of the series, and it composes two of the earlier plans (smart home for the Home Assistant side, and the group-scale patterns from the community manager). Honest cost: model API spend multiplied by a chatty family, metered Nous Portal tools if you use the cloud browser for grocery checkout, and an always-on machine (the mini PC already running Home Assistant is the classic answer).

The plan, in six parts

1What you geta family’s Tuesday on a timeline — every event tagged with which profile acted, on which surface 2Product specwho this is for, the house rules the agent runs under, and what it deliberately refuses to do 3Architectureprofiles not roles, one gateway each, and the shared family vault — which Hermes does not ship, so you build it 4Set it upinstall, profiles, pairing codes, Home Assistant, calendar via MCP — real commands, staged 5The promptsstaged, paste-able — the household SOUL.md, the scheduling cron, the grocery skill, the family review 6The trapsallow-all groups, one shared memory for five people, metered tools × family chatter, cron that nags

Is this for you?

Yes, if your household already runs on a group chat and someone (you) is the unpaid human scheduler — this moves the coordination work onto a machine you control, not a cloud subscription. Yes, if you already run Home Assistant: you have the always-on box and half the integrations. Skip it if nobody else in the house will actually message the thing — a family OS with one user is just a personal assistant with extra YAML. This plan deliberately does not cover Home Assistant device onboarding (that’s the smart home plan), does not touch payments or checkout automation beyond a hard “a human presses pay” line, and is not a parental-surveillance product — the member boundaries here exist to keep people’s messages private, not to read them.