I Gave Hermes Agent's Tools to Muse and Gemini

You're probably wondering why I would do such a thing. I can hear you now screaming, "But your privacy!" at the top of your lungs, and I agree. Part of the reason I set up my Hermes agent was to take my data back from big providers, but the other part is that it sounded fun to build an agentic AI assistant.

But that initial setup was months ago. Now, there are publicly available agentic solutions for free. Meta Muse is free to anybody who wants it, and Gemini Spark is one student enrollment verification away from a year of free use. It starts to make the rapidly accumulating API charges look like a furnace that I'm throwing cash into. All that cost for what turns out to be an inferior product. So the solution seems simple. I just transition over to these free agents and leave Hermes in the dust.

Except there was one problem. I initially set up my cloud server for the purpose of running Hermes and nothing else, but it has since grown into a full collection of self-hosted applications. One of the nicest things about my setup is that my agent has direct access to all of my tools. I didn't want to give that up, but I also wanted to try these new agents out. So a solution was needed; I had to find a way to give these new agents access to my server.

I thought about looking into ways for these agents to have some sort of worker installed on my server. Muse doesn't really have anything for this, but Google comes very close with its Antigravity CLI. It's agentic, it can control the device it's installed on, and it's included in my Google AI Pro plan. Just one problem: I wanted an assistant, not just an agent. There was no clear way to easily message it tasks from my phone, and definitely no voice control option, so it was out. I was stumped until I discovered both agents could use MCP.

For those unaware, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. Created by Anthropic in 2024, it's a way to connect AI applications to external tools and data. It can be used for many things, but in our case, it will be used to give other agents access to the tools used by Hermes. The Hermes Agent platform already came with an MCP server for the purpose of exposing the agent itself, so it was simple enough to expand it to include all the tools the agent uses to complete tasks.

So now Muse and Gemini both have control over my server. I haven't had a chance to really get into using it yet, but the time will come. But there is still one unanswered question: what about my privacy? Honestly, I don't have a great answer. I wish I could have the best of both worlds. A cheap agentic digital assistant, and all my data completely private. Unfortunately, I can't, and the consumer options are looking way better than what I had managed to build, so I made the choice many people make every day. I chose convenience over privacy.

I’m hoping to share some thoughts once I get a better feel for how this plays out in practice. Until then, we'll see where it goes.