Hermes Kanban: The Research-to-Draft Relay

The Stack

Tested Against

Prerequisites

• Hermes Agent (MIT): `curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash`
• `hermes setup` to configure an LLM provider (only needed to actually run the workers)
• `hermes gateway start` so the dispatcher picks up ready tasks (ticks every 60s)
• Node 20+ (used here to read the --json board state)

Steps

1. 1

   Create the relay and verify the parent links

   Init the board, create two research cards and a writer card, and link the writer to both researchers as parents. CI asserts (via `show --json`) that the writer card really carries both parent ids — the gate that makes the relay work.

   hermes kanban init >/dev/null
   mkid() { node -e 'let s="";process.stdin.on("data",d=>s+=d).on("end",()=>process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(s).id))'; }
   export RA=$(hermes kanban create "Research the funding landscape, NA angle" --assignee researcher-a --json | mkid)
   export RB=$(hermes kanban create "Research the funding landscape, EU angle" --assignee researcher-b --json | mkid)
   export W=$(hermes kanban create "Draft the launch post" --assignee writer --parent "$RA" --parent "$RB" --json | mkid)
   hermes kanban show "$W" --json | node -e 'let s="";process.stdin.on("data",d=>s+=d).on("end",()=>{const o=JSON.parse(s);const p=o.parents||[];if(!p.includes(process.env.RA)||!p.includes(process.env.RB)){console.log("MISSING PARENT");process.exit(1)}console.log("relay OK: writer "+o.id+" linked to "+p.length+" parents")})'

2. 2

   Run the relay (the worker step, not checked by CI)

   Start the gateway and the two research cards dispatch immediately and run in parallel; the writer card stays gated until both complete, then wakes with their results on the board. This step runs models, so CI doesn't run it — the badge covers the board + link structure above.