Agent stack build plans · № 6 · 1 of 6

What you get

Not a dashboard. A colleague who happens to live in your walls and knows the house rules.

The finished build has no UI of its own. Home Assistant keeps its dashboards; Hermes shows up as a Telegram contact who occasionally does things and occasionally asks first. The mock below is a plausible Wednesday evening — sensor events on the left (arriving over HA’s WebSocket), agent decisions on the right (tool calls, silence, or a message to you).

Static mock — this is what the gateway session log amounts to, tidied up. Entity ids are examples.

Wednesday evening · gateway sessionmodel: your cheap one

HA eventHermes

17:42

sun.sun → below_horizon

ha_call_service light.turn_on → light.living_room_lampMEMORY.md: “lamps on within 10 min of sunset on weekdays”

17:58

person.asha → home

ha_call_service climate.set_temperature 21.5 → climate.hallwaypattern: home ~18:00 Tue/Thu; pre-warm the hallway

18:31

binary_sensor.kitchen_motion → on

no action — kitchen motion at dinner time is normal; cooldown holds further motion events for 30 s

20:47

cover.garage_door open since 19:15 (92 min)

Telegram → you: “The garage has been open for an hour and a half — unusual for a Wednesday night. Want me to close it? Closing anything is on manual approval, so I’ll wait for a yes.”

20:48

you, on Telegram: “yes”

ha_call_service cover.close_cover → cover.garage_doorapproved · logged to the session

23:30

cron → pattern-distiller fires

memory add: “garage left open evenings ~1×/week; nudge after 60 min”MEMORY.md now 1,986 / 2,200 chars — one stale rule dropped to make room

What’s real in that mock

The left column is Hermes’s Home Assistant gateway platform: state-change events over WebSocket, filtered by watch_domains / watch_entities, with a cooldown_seconds throttle (default 30). No polling loop — the agent is told when something happens.
The right column is only ever four tools — ha_list_entities, ha_get_state, ha_list_services, ha_call_service — plus messages out through any gateway platform (Telegram here).
The reasons under each action come from ~/.hermes/memories/MEMORY.md — a deliberately tiny (2,200-character) distilled model of your household, not a log.
The 23:30 row is the part you build: a nightly cron job you create with hermes cron create that reviews the day’s events and folds new patterns into memory. Hermes supplies the scheduler, the session search, and the memory tool; the convention is yours — architecture names the seam, the prompts build it.
The asking-first behaviour is Hermes approvals (approvals.mode) plus your house policy, not a hardcoded feature — setup covers it.

The honest pitch: for the first week this is a slightly needy housemate who asks about everything. By week three, the memory has maybe fifteen terse rules in it, and the messages drop to one or two a day that are actually worth getting.

Disagree? Pin a note on it →