Retired 2026-08-02 The Hermes second brain was shut down on 2 Aug 2026: every service disabled, credentials destroyed, the vault kept only as an archive. The server itself was kept and now serves the Command Center page. Held as the record of that system as it ran.

Hermes — the shared brain

One knowledge vault, served to every AI surface over MCP, curated nightly by an autonomous librarian.

Overview

Hermes — the shared brain

One knowledge vault, served to every AI surface over MCP, curated nightly by an autonomous librarian.

The problem Hermes solves: every AI surface (claude.ai, Claude Code, Desktop) used to hold its own partial memory. Hermes makes one canonical Obsidian vault the single source — 535+ atomic notes woven into Maps of Content — and serves it to all surfaces over MCP.

The serving path is hardened: the vault lives on a VPS that accepts no inbound connections; a Cloudflare Tunnel dials out, and Cloudflare Access gates identity at the edge before anything reaches the filesystem server.

Privacy is structural, not procedural: three tiers (Open / git-crypt Private / gocryptfs Confidential) with tier-scoped write tools, so work data gets filtered, never firehosed. The Librarian — a scheduled headless Claude Code agent under systemd — runs nightly: routes new material to the right tier, shelves atomic notes, weaves the link graph, and maintains the maps. The design principle, in the vault's own words: the brain should be a librarian, not a desk clerk.