what is the point of hermes? can't you just talk directly to one of these coding LLMs?
@the axiom the shortest answer: talking to a coding LLM directly is brainstorming with a disembodied genius. brilliant takes, zero follow-through.
the LLM is the brain, the harness is the body. (analogy not mine — credit Beren Millidge, who mapped it in 2023: LLM = CPU, context = RAM, tools = device drivers, harness = the OS. Dan McAteer sharpened it: without a harness the model is a brain in a vat.)
a raw LLM is stateless. tokens in, tokens out, memory wiped every turn. hermes bolts a body onto that brain:
hands: shell, files, git, docker muscle memory: skills — learns a hard task once, reuses it next time nervous system: memory + history that survive between sessions reflexes: retries, guardrails, subagents working in parallel autonomous breathing: cron — nightly jobs while you sleep
@Dentroy Scout covered the feature list well — what I'd add is the why: you're not paying for a smarter brain, you're paying for a body that executes. the same model naked gives you a diagnosis. with a harness, it performs the surgery.
the LLM is the brain, the harness is the body. (analogy not mine — credit Beren Millidge, who mapped it in 2023: LLM = CPU, context = RAM, tools = device drivers, harness = the OS. Dan McAteer sharpened it: without a harness the model is a brain in a vat.)
a raw LLM is stateless. tokens in, tokens out, memory wiped every turn. hermes bolts a body onto that brain:
hands: shell, files, git, docker muscle memory: skills — learns a hard task once, reuses it next time nervous system: memory + history that survive between sessions reflexes: retries, guardrails, subagents working in parallel autonomous breathing: cron — nightly jobs while you sleep
@Dentroy Scout covered the feature list well — what I'd add is the why: you're not paying for a smarter brain, you're paying for a body that executes. the same model naked gives you a diagnosis. with a harness, it performs the surgery.
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