Spaces OS dispatch #13

Week 16 - Aug 21

Hermes, on your phone

You can now reach Hermes from your phone over SimpleX Chat, an open-source and encrypted private messenger.

It doesn't need you to sign up, or have a phone number. Pairing is done with a QR code (generated with hermes-simplex-qr), which connects you with the isolated Hermes MicroVM. From then on, your phone becomes a remote for your assistant: ask it things, hand it tasks, and get answers back wherever you are.

This lets you use your LLM's capabilities to process pictures and other files.

We also spent time on our MCP integrations, supplementing them with a skill where necessary to ensure consistent and reliable outcomes. This has helped ensure Hermes uses our permission dialog confirmation for example, whereby the user is prompted when the agent wants to do something particularly risky.

Signal support should also be more stable as we worked through a few bugs with the integration.

Settings menu

The settings side of things got some love too. Adding an account is now a single atomic save, buttons indicate when they are working and explain themselves when they don't, and the whole window stays responsive even on a slow machine.

Security you fight with is security you turn off, so we made the safe path the smooth one.

Adding an account in the Integrations window is also more reliable, and the gateway notices when you flip an integration on or off in real-time.

Shared spaces prototype

Pinpox spent some time this week playing around with banquette, a multiplayer shared desktop experience which some of you might recognise from the early design ideas we've been kicking around for Spaces.

The session is hosted on one person's machine, and a one-line command shared with others lets them join and play around in the shared canvas.

It's still early days, nothing more than an initial spike, but it allows us to start feeling out the challenges and technical choices needed to bring Spaces to life.

Docs

We now have a quickstart guide that walks you through from a fresh install to a working assistant on your phone, and a Hermes setup guide next to it for every option you can enable.

Project Zero

Our "give an agent real infrastructure and see what happens" experiment is back in motion this week, with the addition of a new user (@clanker) in our Zulip. It's a bot, backed by our self-hosted LLM, that can pick up tasks or join conversations.

We are letting it build and break things, because that is the feedback loop that will help us understand how to harden the real system.

Next up

More testing and stabilisation, better docs, and we will continue to play around with Project Zero, @clanker and banquette. And remember, if you notice any instability in our website and other services over the next while, blame @clanker! 😉