How To Build a PREMIUM Hermes Agent Mission Control Dashboard transcript

This is my Hermes Agent Mission Control Dashboard. From one screen, I can see what Hermes is doing, what needs my approval, which workflows are running, what shipped, and what I should do next. And the most important part is I can control my Hermes Agent straight from this dashboard and [music] talk to all of my different sub agents. So, in this video, I'm going to show you how I built this, what I included, and how you can build your own version today.

And if you keep watching till the end, I'll [music] even give you a free template of my own dashboard for you to steal. Let's get started. Hermes is powerful because it does not only live in one chat window. It can run in Telegram, it can work in your terminal, it can read files, it can use tools, it can run in the background while you are not sitting there babysitting it. And that is amazing, but it creates a new problem.

Once the agent starts doing real work, chat becomes a terrible place to manage it. A normal chat thread tells you what happened in the one conversation. It does not show you the full system. It does not show every open loop, every failed run, every approval waiting, every scheduled job, so on and so forth. And every task, essentially, your agents are carrying out. That is why I wanted a mission control. Not because Hermes needed another pretty interface, but because I needed visibility.

Hermes does the work. Hermes HQ, which is what I call my mission control, lets me see the work. And once you understand that difference, the dashboard becomes much easier to design because you're not building a homepage, you're building an operating room. Any premium mission control needs five main layers. First is the command layer. This is where I can send tasks to Hermes from my mission control. I can use a command palette or the Hermes bar, type the task and the bridge sends it into what is called a message bus.

Second is the approval layer. Safe tasks can run, but anything external has to wait for approval. This is the most important part if you want agents to be useful without becoming dangerous. And then third is the visibility layer. I can see agents, I can see tasks, cron jobs, costs, and failures. If something breaks, I do not want to discover it three days later because a Telegram thread went quiet. Then fourth is the memory layer.

My long-term memory wiki is mirrored here inside of Hermy HQ. This allows me to browse and edit it. That means the dashboard is not only showing activity, it is also showing what the agent is learning. And fifth and finally is the operator layer. This is the daily brief, the next actions panel, the content OS, and the places where Hermes tells me what needs my attention. These are the five pillars that take any mission control from a cool-looking dashboard into a useful one.

Command, approval, visibility, memory, and operator decisions. The first thing I wanted was simple. I should be able to send work to Hermes without leaving the dashboard. This is why Hermy HQ has a dispatch flow. I can open the command palette, for example, and type in something, send the task straight from the site. Summarize my YouTube performance this week. There we go. I can search things up and if they're not there, I can send it straight as a task.

And as you can see, it sends it to Hermes and it gets on it right away. Behind the scenes, the site is writing the request into Postgres. My Mac mini, which is my local machine, runs a local bridge called Hermes Bridge. I know, creative. That bridge pulls the database, picks up queued work, runs Hermes through the CLI, and writes the result back. The important part is that my local machine is still doing the actual work.

I'm not exposing my Mac mini to the internet. I'm not giving the website direct shell access. The dashboard sends structured work into a message bus and the local bridge decides what to do with it. That gives me the feeling of a web command center without turning my computer into a public API. >> [snorts] >> And if you're building your own version, this is the first big design decision. Do not start with cards and charts.

Start with the dispatch path. Ask yourself, how does a task get from my mission control to Hermes and how does the result get back to me? Once that works, the rest of the dashboard becomes much more useful. The second layer is approvals and honestly, this is the part I care about the most. If an agent can only talk, it is limited. If an agent can act without approval, it is risky. The sweet spot is an agent that can prepare the work, explain the action, and wait for a human tap before doing, you know, anything consequential.

This is why Hermes HQ has an approval inbox. Safe tasks can run immediately. But, if Hermes wants to, for example, send an email, buy something, delete a file, or commit anything externally, that shouldn't not happen automatically. It gets parked over here. I see what Hermes wants to do, why it wants to do it, what the output is, and then I approve or reject it. This changes the way you think about AI automation. The question is not can I make the agent fully autonomous?

The better question is where should the agent be autonomous and where should it ask for permission? That one question makes the whole system a whole lot more useful. Because now Hermes can move fast on research, briefs, internal updates, crons that I've approved, while still slowing down before public or expensive actions. A mission control dashboard without approvals is basically what I like to think of as a fancy status page.

Approvals are what turn it into an operating system you can actually trust. Once dispatch and approvals work, the next thing you need is visibility. I want to know what is currently alive in the system, which workflows are running, what failed, and what is waiting on me. That is why the dashboard has agent and workflow cards. For my setup, that means things like seeing what each of my agents are doing, if there are any blockers, if any of them have failed, have gone offline.

I can even decide to chat with any of my specific sub agents. For example, I have Technically, Hermes, I need to update the name. It's still based on my very old AI agent that I've just never updated. I can speak to Hermes, which is my chief of staff, directly. That would be useless to do here. However, what is useful to do here is I can speak to Sage, my ex-content specialist. I can speak to Nova, my YouTube specialist.

I can speak to Knox, my trading specialist. I can speak to Pixel, my web design specialist. So on and so forth. That also means things like I can see our own uh Hermes performance together. I can go to client pulse. I can go to client pulse for client monitoring. I can go to pipeline and see, you know, what are the ex- content ideas that I've approved, that I've not approved, that are in the pipeline, that aren't. I can see what articles we have in the pipeline.

I can see what YouTube videos we have in the pipeline, what tasks are currently pending in the pipeline or needing my approval and being blocked. Uh I literally just went through this, so I maybe should have left a few tasks, but I can go ahead and add a new task over here. So on and so forth. Each card should answer a few questions quickly. What is this workflow? What is the status? What is the next action? And is there a blocker?

If a card cannot answer those four questions, it is probably decoration. This is where a lot of AI dashboards go wrong. They show a bunch of impressive-looking activity. It looks fancy. It looks nice, but the operator, you, still do not know what to do with that information. So for every module in your dashboard, for every model in my dashboard, I ask myself the same question. If I saw this at 8:00 a.m. before I've had my morning coffee and was able to properly open my eyes, would this piece of information help me make a decision?

Is it simple enough for me to just look at and know what to do next? If it's a yes, it stays. If it's a no, it gets cut. The next layer is scheduled work, which is over here. Hermes supports cron jobs, which means you can tell it to run work on a schedule. Daily briefs, content checks, client alerts, anything that needs to happen without you manually asking it every single time. But, scheduled work has a hidden problem.

If you do not watch it, it quietly becomes still. I'm sure you've had annoying cron jobs you've scheduled weeks ago that still run in a chat since deserted. A cron job can fail, a credential can expire, a delivery can break, a model can error, and if all of that lives in logs somewhere, you will not notice until the workflow was supposed to save you time and it didn't. So, the dashboard needs a cron monitor, not just a list of schedule, a real monitor that shows you, you know, what crons ran, what happened.

For example, the thing I just literally asked it to do has erred, which tells me I need to look into it. Now, lucky enough, we have a cron that is dedicated to seeing which errors are happening so that it can fix them on its own every single hour. Um but that being said, we need to know these things in case say even that cron failed. What do I do then? Everything just breaks and, you know, I never get to find out about it until it's been days where it's been broken.

For my setup specifically, this matters a lot because so much of Hermes' value comes from scheduled intelligence. It checks my YouTube competitors, my YouTube opportunities. It watches my notion and monitors all of our clients, and it prepares things before I ask it to. But the moment scheduled work becomes invisible, it becomes fragile. So, this section of the dashboard is not there to look technical, it's there to protect the workflows I depend on the most.

The next piece is memory. Hermes already has persistent memory, but for a real operating system, I wanted something bigger and more inspectable. So, I added memory wiki. It lives on my local machine. It has projects, lessons, facts, logs, and so much more. Hermy HQ mirrors it into the dashboard, so I can read it, search it, edit it without digging through files myself. A lot of people here can choose to install a memory database for themselves and mirror it over here on their dashboard as well.

That also works if you'd like to do that. A memory wiki matters so much because the agent's job is not only to complete tasks, it should also preserve the decisions that made the tasks work. If I correct Hermy's on how I want a YouTube script written, that belongs in memory. If we decide that side-effecting dashboard actions needs approval, that belongs in memory. The dashboard makes that memory visible, and that changes the relationship with the agent.

It stops feeling like every session starts from zero because you can see the system accumulating judgment over time. The rule I use is simple. Hot memory is for the tiny facts Hermy's needs constantly. The wiki is for the bigger project context, decisions, lessons, and open loops. And the daily brief gets sharper when the wiki is current. And the best part is I can even go into here and inspect the different memories.

I can edit them if I feel anything is wrong about them, and save them again to memory, just like that. Okay, this is where the dashboard starts to feel less like analytics and more like a chief of staff. Every morning, the bridge asks Hermes for a structured brief. Things like priorities, decisions needed, what shipped, and what is being blocked right now, and what should happen next next actions. That sounds simple, but it changes how you use your system.

Instead of waking up and asking yourself, "What was I doing again yesterday?" the dashboard should already be telling you what needs attention right now, and what are your next action. For me, the brief should pull from the wiki, recent session, crons, content workflows, and anything waiting for approval. So, my approval inbox. The output should be very specific. What video needs a decision? What automation failed? What client alert needs review?

What approval is waiting? And what is the one thing I should do next? That is the difference between a chatbot summary and a chief of staff brief. One tells you what happened, the other helps you decide what to do. Because my business runs heavily on content, I also have a content OS. So, I can go, for example, to X, to YouTube, to my pipeline, articles, so on and so forth. This is a pipeline essentially for content ideas.

Ideas move to approved, scheduled, posted. The system can track viral scores and help me decide what is worth pushing forward. For For YouTube, it connects to Nova, my YouTube agent. For X, it connects to Sage, my X agent. Your mission control should not be a generic AI dashboard. It should show the workflows that actually run your life or business. For me, that means YouTube. X, uh client monitoring, business monitoring, operations, approvals, scheduled research.

For someone else, it might be sales calls, support tickets, engineering tasks, hiring, invoices. I don't know. Whatever it is that you do, that should be the core of your mission control. The framework is the same, but the modules should be different. If you copy my dashboard exactly, you might get a cool interface, but if you copy the logic behind my dashboard, then you build something useful for your own work. If I was building this from scratch again, I would not start with the design.

I would start with five questions. First, what should Hermes be able to see? That could be tasks, sessions, crons, maybe Notion pages, maybe logs. Second, what should Hermes be able to do from the dashboard? This is dispatch. Can it draft, update a page, create a task? What do you need it to be able to do? Third, what actions need approval? This is where you draw a safety boundary. What do you think needs your approval for it to happen?

Fourth, what memory should be visible? If the agent is learning, you should be able to inspect what it learned. Maybe you don't care about that. Maybe you've just started your Hermes journey, and maybe, you know, your agent doesn't have that complex of a memory just yet. But that is something you will eventually have to answer. Fifth, what decision should the dashboard help you make every morning? That is the question that keeps the design extremely useful, because the goal is not to show you everything.

The goal is to show the things that impact what you do next. Technically, my setup uses a Vercel dashboard, a Postgres as message bus, and a local bridge on my Mac mini that runs Hermes through the CLI. But, the exact stack matters less than the logic behind my mission control. The web dashboard is for visibility, the message bus is for requests, the local bridge is for execution, the approval inbox for safety, the wiki for memory, and the daily brief for decisions.

That is the architecture. The most common mistake I see people do when setting up their mission control is showing too much. Your mission control should not create more noise for you. It should help you focus and lock into the work you want to get done. That's it. Try to start with as little as possible. Trust me, less is more when it comes to mission controls. Now, if you want to install or start off with this very exact template, I have open-sourced it on my GitHub.

You can copy the link, send it to your own Hermes agent, and ask it to help you install it. It has instructions for your agent to read and help you onboard and install it step by step. The biggest shift I want you to take from this video is this. At first, Hermes feels like something you message. Then, it becomes something that works for you. But, once it starts working across Telegram, Notion, cron jobs, workflows, you need a place to manage that system.

That is what Hermes HQ is for me. It's not Hermes, it's the control layer around Hermes. It lets me send work, approve risky actions, monitor schedule jobs, track my content, and see what actually needs my attention. If you want Hermes to become part of your or how your business runs, then chat is not enough. You need Mission Control. Comment below with the first function you're going to build for your own dashboard.

And if you enjoyed this video, make sure to leave a like. And if you're new to my channel, then subscribe because I have a ton more content just like this coming your way. Oh, and the algorithm gods just told me that you're very likely to enjoy this video as well. So, maybe click it, and maybe I'll see you there.