My AI Harness Setup - 2026-Oct

My current setup is mostly all around Hermes.

Personal Agent

• runs on an old MacMini 2012, 16GB RAM, running Ubuntu
• self hosted honcho memory
• agent-browser with a queue system to not flood the RAM
• I can reach this Hermes via Discord, Slack, via the web, or via the iOS apps.
• I started with Discord and created channel based projects so each channel was either a repo or a normal folder with its own AGENTS.md so that I could simply jump into the channel and say what I needed. The agent would always take my message / request in the context of that channel.

This agent is like a Chief of Staff, I can delegate a lot of tasks to it, ask it things, etc.. Examples of how I use it:

• What can I make with [list of random ingredients]?
• Upgrade the harnesses in the network?
• I experienced some wifi disconnects, audit the network … then monitor the network hourly for the next 3 days to check if it happens again.
• Every Sunday morning, I want to have a list of all the interesting events happening around me.

Coding

• runs on a VPS on netcup.com, 8 vCore, 16 GB
• has a bunch of harnesses running in it: Pi, Claude Code, Codex, PrimeAgent, Hermes
• can access via ssh but I prefer a GUI / meta harness

Current rotation

T3Code Main harness. It’s a meta harness that orchestrates one of the many harnesses on that machine.

• It’s a good GUI, has various “entry points”: web, macOS, and iOS apps.
• Good UX: project based, can work on any of the machines on the network.
• The iOS app is a key part of why I stick with it.
• Easy to drop images, videos, etc. and it handles it well.

Hermes The new macOS app has inspired me to try to substitute T3Code with it.

• I like that I can have multiple windows (a thing missing from T3Code).
• Can connect multiple servers
• no official iOS app yet.
• Left-sidebar works the way my mind works.
• Easy to have multiple projects – it even has an auto-detect projects feature.
• Shows tool calls and diffs of files – helps me stay connected / aware of the code.
• merges my chat bot with my coding agent.
• it has GrokBot style bots.

Orca Tried it, but retired. The iOS app just wraps the terminal apps of Pi, Codex, etc. so the experience is not great. And a lot of times when I reopen the app the session is lost.

Herd I use it a bit, but it’s terminal only which is not ideal. Dropping files to remote machines is a pain.

Running Apps

My conglomerate of apps (yes, with 0 to 1 users) are all hosted in a Hetzner VPS, managed by Coolify.

Tools

• Tailscale: indispensable with this setup.
• CleanshotX: excellent for taking screenshots and screen recordings to send as feedback to the klankers. Get it via Setapp and you get the cloud service which is very handy to use with remote harnesses.
• 1Password + Direnv + Varlock: I use this weird combination I use to keep my secrets synchronized and usable by the harnesses. It’s likely overkill, but I haven’t gotten around to finding an alternative.

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