Easier Hermes Roadmap

Principle

Hermes should become an operating layer for Easier, not a loose chatbot with access to everything. The system should earn trust through memory quality, clear roles, reviewable work and reversible automation.

Current State

Completed:

• Hermes source staged on the GCE n8n host at /srv/easier-hermes.
• Source pinned to v2026.5.16.
• Empty vault skeleton staged.
• Ops package pushed to easiermarketing/easier-hermes.
• No image, container, port, connector, provider secret or scheduled agent is active.

Known constraints:

• VM is an e2-medium with 4 GB RAM and limited disk headroom.
• It already runs n8n, Easier Done, Easier Marketing and nginx.
• Notion is useful context but appears to be a system being migrated away from.
• Airtable and Easier Now are strategically important.
• Slack is preferred over Telegram.
• Fathom is preferred over Fireflies.
• Raw Fathom transcripts, Slack history and Google Drive creatives should not be bulk-copied into the VM. They should be digested into useful memory at a sensible cadence.

Phase 0: Control Tower

Goal: make the project self-steering before any agent is alive.

Tasks:

• Maintain this repo as the source for ops docs, templates and runbooks.
• Keep live vault data, secrets, sessions and indexes out of Git.
• Add role templates: soul.md, agents.md, heartbeat.md, SOPs and hard gates.
• Define the first agent and benchmark questions.

Exit gate:

• Docs in this repo are complete enough that another engineer or agent can continue without guessing permissions or intent.

Phase 1: Synthetic Local Agent

Goal: prove Hermes can work with the vault structure without touching private systems.

Tasks:

• Build Hermes image during a quiet maintenance window or on a roomier host.
• Run Hermes interactively only.
• Use synthetic notes that mirror Easier departments: marketing, sales, relationship, fulfilment, operations and R&D.
• Test official llm-wiki workflow.
• Keep all output draft-only.

Exit gate:

• Agent can answer 30 synthetic questions with citations to source notes and can refuse unsafe actions.

Phase 2: COO / AI Ops Manager

Goal: create one useful operating profile with no external side effects.

Recommended first role:

• COO / AI Ops Manager, because the first problem is building the agent operating system, shared context, memory filter, role templates, gates and evaluation harness.

Founder EA and Research Analyst can become specialist agents later. ContentOS, outbound and social agents should wait until this layer can keep context clean and enforce approvals.

Exit gate:

• Shared SOUL.md is reviewed.
• coo-ai-ops-manager role files exist.
• Daily and weekly loops are manual or dry-run only.
• Agent can produce cross-department reviews from provided notes.

Phase 3: Memory Layer Evaluation

Goal: choose the retrieval layer with evidence.

Candidates:

• Hermes native session search.
• Hermes llm-wiki.
• QMD.
• gbrain.

Exit gate:

• Correct source appears in top 5 for at least 80 percent of benchmark queries.
• Sensitive material does not leak across inappropriate contexts.
• Disk and memory impact is acceptable for the chosen host.

Phase 4: First Read-Only Connector

Goal: connect one real source safely.

Candidate order:

1. Fathom receipts and meeting digests, read-only export or manual import.
2. Calendar, read-only.
3. Slack, read-only in a restricted channel.
4. Airtable, read-only selected bases/views.
5. Notion export/import only while migrating.

Exit gate:

• Every imported item has provenance.
• Every imported raw item has a digest plan and a retention rule.
• No agent can send, edit, delete or invite.
• Import can be disabled and rolled back.

Phase 5: Slack Interface

Goal: make Hermes accessible where work happens, without creating a remote control problem.

Initial shape:

• One private Slack app.
• One internal channel: int-agentops.
• Draft-only responses.
• No DMs to customers or team.
• No channel writes except in int-agentops.
• Slash command or mention workflow, not autonomous posting.

Exit gate:

• Logs prove what context was used and what action was proposed.
• Human approval is mandatory for external output.

Phase 6: n8n Approval Workflows

Goal: let Hermes propose work and n8n route approvals.

Examples:

• Draft a follow-up, put it in an approval queue.
• Summarise a Fathom call, create a Notion/Airtable draft record.
• Prepare weekly client relationship prompts for review.
• Create product/R&D brief from research notes.

Exit gate:

• All writes go through a named approval flow.
• Every flow has an owner, rollback plan and audit log.

Phase 7: Controlled Autonomy

Goal: allow narrow, reversible recurring actions.

Possible later automations:

• Daily founder brief.
• Weekly relationship risk review.
• Weekly SOP improvement proposals.
• Research digest.
• Slack reminders to Anthony only.

Still gated:

• Sending customer/prospect messages.
• Changing spend, ads, billing or contracts.
• Editing source-of-truth client records.
• Deleting or exporting private data.