← Selected work
Record 02 Local AI systems 2026

Nexus / Hermes

A local environment for testing agents, knowledge workflows, and the operating boundaries that make AI work inspectable.

Active laboratory

The idea

The experiment is moving from isolated prompts toward an environment that can preserve context, assign work, expose state, accept correction, and keep a human approval boundary where it matters.
Nexus / Hermes — public system view
01 Capture Preserve the source material
02 Distill Transform without erasing origin
03 Assign Route bounded work to agents
04 Inspect Expose state, artifacts, and drift
05 Approve Keep consequential writes human-led
01

Agents need an operating environment

Nexus is where local model serving, retrieval, transcription, task routing, and named agent roles meet. Scout, Librarian, and Forge are not personas for their own sake; they are experiments in separating responsibilities and making work easier to inspect and hand off.

02

Memory without flattening the person

A recurring design question is how an assistant can learn context and preferences while remaining its own tool—and while preserving source material, provenance, correction, and user control. The knowledge workflow is treated as infrastructure, not magic memory.

03

Useful before autonomous

The lab favors small, observable workflows over broad claims of autonomy: capture a conversation, preserve the raw record, create a restrained draft, expose the transformation, and require approval before it enters the system of record.

What this work demonstrates

Evidence, not a capability list.

  • Local model and retrieval infrastructure
  • Role-bounded agent experiments
  • Source-preserving transcription and distillation
  • Inspectable artifacts and human approval gates
  • Privacy and data-sovereignty constraints

Public boundary

This is an active research environment, not a finished product or a claim of production autonomy. Public material focuses on design questions and operating principles.