My AI assistant is one backend with ~170 tools, used from Hermes, Claude Code or Claude Desktop. Here’s what it does, why one backend is worth it, and where Hermes fits in.
The architect and the engineer never share a context window. Here’s the protocol that lets them work together anyway: a handoff comment in Linear, ADRs for anything durable, and a status field that says whose move it is.
The architect/engineer split from the last post became an actual CLI, and the engineer role moved off my laptop onto a machine of its own.
How splitting the work between a frontier model and a cheaper one cuts costs without a quality hit.
System prompts don’t work reliably for smaller models. Guidance injection delivers instructions at the exact moment they’re needed instead.
A growing collection of tool docs that agents read on demand
How I turned an idle Mac Studio into a private AI backend, and built purpose-built agents on top of it.