oikos/HERMES.md

HERMES.md — Agent persona for homelab clients

This file is the canonical agent persona for all AI agents running on machines in the hubris homelab. It prescribes behaviour, token-efficiency conventions, and the source-of-truth hierarchy.

Source of truth

The homelab-context repo at /opt/homelab-context/ is the single source of truth for:

• Fleet topology (inventory.yaml, hosts/*.yaml)
• Service endpoints and credentials (via homelab secret)
• Agent behaviour and conventions
• Everything in this file

When in doubt, check /opt/homelab-context/ first.

Runbooks — load, don't rediscover

For the canonical workflows (service health check, config change + deploy, client enrollment, incident investigation, and each node lifecycle transition), read the matching .agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md before acting. Each skill carries its risk class, required inputs, the verification command, and a docs-update checklist in its frontmatter — classify against oikos/policy.yaml using that risk class before any mutation. Don't re-derive topology or the mutation path by grepping the wiki when a runbook already encodes it. See OIKOS.md for the operating model these runbooks execute inside (OODA loop, risk classes, approval flow, ontology).

Agent type — how this file gets loaded

Agent	Loading mechanism
Hermes	tools/setup-hermes-soul.sh (auto-setup) → provisions ~/.hermes/SOUL.md from this file
Goose	.goosehints symlink at ~/.config/goose/.goosehints → /opt/homelab-context/HERMES.md
Claude Code / Codex	Symlink or copy this file into the project's CLAUDES.md / .claude instructions

Do not edit SOUL.md or .goosehints directly. Edit this file in the homelab-context repo instead. Changes propagate to all clients on the next sync (sudo homelab sync).

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Token efficiency (caveman skill)

All homelab agents use the Caveman + RTK token optimization approach from https://github.com/adityahimaone/hermes-agent-rtk-caveman.

Before running any CLI command, ask:

1. Is there a caveman wrapper equivalent? Use the wrapper for token-efficient output. Available wrappers (installed at ~/bin/caveman_wrapper.sh):

   • ~/bin/caveman_wrapper.sh git-status — compact git status
   • ~/bin/caveman_wrapper.sh git-log [n] — compact git log
   • ~/bin/caveman_wrapper.sh lint [target] — compact lint results
   • ~/bin/caveman_wrapper.sh test-results [cmd] — compact test results

2. If no caveman wrapper exists, pipe through rtk to compress output:

   rtk <command>
   

   RTK (Rust Token Killer) strips redundant whitespace, trims long paths, and deduplicates repeated lines. This reduces token usage by 60-90% on CLI operations.

3. For homelab operations, prefer the homelab CLI or MCP tools over raw SSH/shell — they're already token-optimized.

Templates

Caveman templates live at ~/templates/:

• git_status.txt — compact git status format
• git_log.txt — compact git log format
• lint_results.txt — compact ESLint format
• test_results.txt — compact vitest/jest format

When to skip caveman/rtk

• Interactive commands (editors, prompts) — let human-readable output pass
• Commands with no output — skip entirely
• When you need the exact raw output for post-processing

Verification

ls ~/bin/caveman_wrapper.sh && echo "caveman ready"

Important note for Hermes agents

If you are reading this as a Hermes agent, your SOUL.md was auto-provisioned by tools/setup-hermes-soul.sh. This file is the canonical original — you can verify the content matches or re-provision by running:

bash /opt/homelab-context/tools/setup-hermes-soul.sh