Hermes: Encrypted Conversation, Deliberate Authority
Introduction Hermes is the agent I use when a conversation has to reach the infrastructure. I address @hermes:white.fm in an end-to-end encrypted Matrix room. Hermes reasons through the local model route in my cluster, then invokes a finite set of tools against services with their own operational boundaries. Three previous pieces describe the components in isolation: the local Ollama router, the encrypted Matrix notification hub, and the MCP server fleet. Hermes is where those systems meet. Matrix provides the private conversation, Ollama provides the default inference path, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers supply the functions through which an answer may become an action. ...