Artifacts in Hermes

I've been using Hermes for quite a while, but interacting with it still felt clumsy. What always held me back a little was that it could only give me content as messages in a chat app. My experience with it really split into before and after when I thought of teaching it to publish web pages. Basically, I reinvented Claude's artifacts for myself and started using them for almost everything.

This whole chain of events started with my design-system skill. When you work with a local agent, viewing a finished page is no problem at all. But when you're messaging Hermes on Discord from your phone, things get less obvious. You need to publish the page somewhere first, then follow a link.

I kept putting this off because I knew I'd need authentication; otherwise, the little secrets Hermes and I share wouldn't stay secret. Setting that up seemed complicated, and I didn't feel like doing it. Then I finally asked the agent to suggest some options.

It turned out I could set up a free Cloudflare Pages project in ten minutes, and Hermes could simply upload the finished pages as files. Cloudflare hosts them and protects them with authentication through Access, so nobody else can get into my cozy little world. To make it even nicer, it all lives on my own domain. Hermes handles the thinking: coming up with a slug, laying out the content with ready-made components, and calling the existing scripts.

Over time, I ended up with a home page with a feed of what's been happening and some handy widgets. Scheduled jobs scattered across Discord channels can now post their updates there too. Quick one-off pages go into an index so I can find them later.

The pages themselves vary a lot. Sometimes it's just a long read that's pleasant to read because of the layout. Sometimes it's a presentation built on the same engine from the skill, so I can nudge Hermes to revise a slide while I'm in a taxi and check it right away. On my last vacation, I even asked the agent to plot interesting places near my hotels on a map. It already knew about the hotels from my bookings.

The idea seems obvious, but it took me far too long to get there.