hermes familiar // an open desk companion // third-party hermes plugin

BUILD A FAMILIAR

Your Hermes agent works all day — in chats, in cron jobs, in worker fleets — and all of it is invisible. A familiar is a small green-phosphor creature that sits on your desk and gives that workforce a body: it shows what the agent is doing the moment it happens, pulses when an approval needs you (tap ALLOW right on the screen), runs your actions from a button, and — with a speaker — talks.

What she does

  • Live state — thinking, tool activity, replies, across every platform your gateway serves (Telegram, Slack, cron, kanban workers)
  • Real approvals — when the agent blocks on a dangerous command, she pulses and chirps; your tap resolves it, same as /approve
  • She reaches out — the agent gets a familiar_notify tool: banner + chirp + optional speech when something needs your desk
  • A voice — replies and alerts spoken in your configured TTS voice, streamed over your LAN into her speaker
  • An evening ritual — once a day she speaks a digest of everything your agents did, composed by your own model

What it takes

~$30 of hardware (one touchscreen dev board, a microSD card, a tiny speaker), a USB-C cable to the machine running your Hermes gateway, and one plugin install. Firmware flashes from your browser — no toolchain. See BUILD for the full bill of materials and PLUGIN for the software side.

status  Docs preview — the public firmware release, browser flasher, and printable case files are landing now. Star the repo to follow along.

For your agent, not just for you

This site is agent-first: agent.md is a machine-readable setup runbook. Once your familiar is flashed and plugged in, tell your Hermes agent: "set up my familiar from buildafamiliar.com/agent.md" — and it installs its own body.