Hermes as Chief of Staff — Multi-Project Agent OS

An Agent Operating System for Your Projects

When Hermes becomes an operating system for your work instead of a single assistant, one “Chief of Staff” agent coordinates a fleet of project-specific sub-agents, each with their own memory and context.

“My ‘main agent’ is my ‘Chief of Staff’ who has his own memory cross-project/workflow. Every ‘project’ (1 project = 1 Slack channel) has its own agent sub-profile with its own memory. The whole system runs on a VPS, with backup routing if the main model fails, and gets backed up every night to Github. Daily reporting is sent to WhatsApp.”

— @ogiberstein on Discord

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Architecture: The Agent OS

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│          CHIEF OF STAFF AGENT           │
│   (Cross-project memory, coordination)  │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                         │
│  ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐│
│  │ Project  │ │ Project  │ │ Project  ││
│  │ Agent A  │ │ Agent B  │ │ Agent C  ││
│  │ (memory) │ │ (memory) │ │ (memory) ││
│  └──────────┘ └──────────┘ └──────────┘│
│                                         │
│  ┌─────────────────────────────────┐    │
│  │      Infrastructure Layer       │    │
│  │  VPS + Nightly GitHub Backup    │    │
│  │  + Fallback Model Routing       │    │
│  └─────────────────────────────────┘    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

The Components

1. Chief of Staff Agent: The “main” agent with cross-project memory. It knows what’s happening across all projects, can spot dependencies, and coordinates handoffs.

2. Project Sub-Agents: Each project (mapped to a Slack channel) gets its own Hermes profile with dedicated memory. This means Project A’s context doesn’t leak into Project B, but the Chief of Staff can pull information from both.

3. Slack Integration: Projects are managed in Slack channels, making collaboration with human team members seamless.

4. Backup Routing: If the primary model fails (API outage, rate limit, etc.), the system automatically falls back to a secondary model. No downtime.

5. Nightly GitHub Backups: The entire agent state — profiles, memory, skills, cron jobs — is backed up to GitHub every night. Full recovery from any disaster.

6. WhatsApp Daily Reporting: Every morning, a concise summary of what happened across all projects is delivered directly to the user’s phone.

The setup runs 24/7, keeps cross-project context, and scales to any number of projects.

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Setup

1. Set up Hermes on a VPS — You need persistent uptime
2. Create your Chief of Staff profile — Give it a SOUL.md focused on coordination and high-level awareness
3. Create sub-profiles per project — Each with narrowed context and domain-specific skills
4. Connect Slack channels — One channel per project, with the agent in each
5. Set up backup routing — Configure OpenRouter with fallback models
6. Add cron-based GitHub backups — git add && git commit && git push nightly
7. Configure WhatsApp reporting — Use the Hermes WhatsApp integration for daily summaries

Start with 2-3 projects, get the rhythm right, then expand. The agent OS grows with you.