Spaces OS dispatch #12

Week 15 - Aug 14

Last week we said we'd work on Hermes stability. We did. And Spaces OS took its first step beyond a single computer.

Hermes, stabilized

Making Hermes the default was the easy part. Making it start reliably on real hardware was the actual work.

Hermes is the assistant built into Spaces OS. It runs inside its own MicroVM — a small, sealed virtual machine, so it can only touch what you explicitly hand it. This week we made that box boot dependably: we replaced a fragile workaround for sharing files into the box with a simpler, more direct mechanism, and we packaged Hermes as a proper Clan service, so it installs and updates like everything else in Spaces OS. There's a getting-started guide now too.

Integrations as building blocks

A quieter change, but a more important one. An integration is how the assistant reaches a service — mail, messages, search — each in its own sandbox. Every integration is now a single self-contained piece: easier to add, easier to inspect, and a problem in one can't spread. The skills that teach an assistant to use them are packaged once and read by every assistant on the system — Hermes or one you bring yourself.

This is the shape we want: the OS provides safe, isolated building blocks, and any assistant plugs into them. We maintain the building blocks, not a frontend.

Three integrations took that new shape this week:

• Private web search. When Hermes searches the web, it now goes through SearXNG, a search relay running on your own machine. The big search engines still answer the queries — but they arrive stripped bare: no account, no cookies, no tracking scripts. Far less for anyone to build a profile from.
• Signal. Messaging for Hermes now fits the same building-block shape, sandboxed like everything else.
• Proton. We fixed several bugs in the privacy-respecting mail integration. It's now a lot more stable.

Reaching past one machine

The more interesting work this week was early and messy: prototyping what it means for a Space to be shared — used by more than one person, across more than one machine.

Still very much prototyping. But it's the first real motion toward what we sketched in dispatch #10: a space as a boundary of access, shared across machines and people — yours, not rented from a cloud provider.

Desktop

Two papercuts fixed: keyboard shortcuts now display correctly, and your chosen keyboard layout is respected everywhere. Small, but it's the kind of thing that matters when this is your daily driver.

Next up

Less building, more living in it. The team is moving onto Spaces OS as the daily setup — the fastest way to find what breaks is to depend on it ourselves. And one new thing: talking to Hermes from your phone, over SimpleX Chat, the private messenger.