At the time of writing, Artie is a team of 17. Every one of us works alongside Hermes, an open-source AI agent harness from @NousResearch. It runs on a single physical machine in Germany, has a different personality for each team, and dreams at night.
This is how it got that way.
It started as one engineer's WhatsApp contact
A few months ago, one of our engineers (Ani, @anirudhsriramzz) was running Hermes for himself. Just a personal setup, and he talked to it over WhatsApp.
Around the same time, Robin, our CTO, came back from a hackathon where a friend had shown him a whole roster of agents running their work. The question he brought back was simple: how do we make that available to everyone at Artie, and not only the engineers?
We looked at OpenClaw first. It's good. But it was easy to watch an agent wander off and do something nobody asked for, and we wanted guardrails before we wanted scale. So we picked Hermes and started thinking about what the guardrails should be.