psychopomp

☤ Psychopomp

Every week, your Hermes helps you write a page of your life. If you ever go silent for good, it carries your words to the people you love.

Psychopomp is a Hermes Agent plugin with a Desktop page. It does three things:

1. Your Book. You don't journal: you live, and talk to Hermes. Once a week it offers to look back with you, using what it already knows (your conversations, its memory), and drafts a short page in your voice: what you did, what moved you, who you loved, what you're grateful for, one line for the people who love you, and one intention. In Hermes Desktop the draft appears in the chat as a page with an Add to my Book button; nothing is kept until you approve it. Your year fills in week by week, and once a year the pages become your year in review.
2. Sealed letters. You write letters to the people you love, alone or with Hermes. Once a letter is sealed, not even Hermes can read it again.
3. The watch. If you stop talking to Hermes for a long time and don't answer its check-ins, it asks your witness, the one person you trust, for a code. Only when they send it does Hermes hand them your Book, a single beautiful file to share with family and friends, and carry each letter to its recipient.

Most of the value is in the weekly Book, which is useful from week one. The passage is what makes the Book matter.

Why "psychopomp"?

In Greek myth, Hermes had two jobs. He was the messenger of the gods, and he was the psychopomp (psychopompós, "guide of souls"): the companion who walked beside every person to the threshold, so nobody made that journey alone. Your Hermes already carries your messages. This plugin gives it the second, gentler job: keeping your story while you live it, and carrying your words when you no longer can.

The tone is vitalist and warm, never morbid. Faith, hope, love, gratitude and forgiveness lead, with the Greek virtues of courage and measure beneath them.

How the passage works

you talk to Hermes ─► heartbeat (CLI, Desktop, TUI, Telegram, any gateway channel)

30 days of silence ─► check-in ─► check-in ─► check-in   (3 days apart, on your channels)
                                                  │ no answer
                                                  ▼
             your witness is asked for a one-time code (PSY-123456), with gentle reminders
                                                  │
        they send it on ANY channel Hermes listens to ─► the Book goes to them,
                                                          each letter to its recipient
        you say anything, anywhere ─► everything resets, and they're told you're fine

• Never early. Nothing is carried unless all three hold: the silence, every unanswered check-in, and a person sending the code. A timer alone can't do it.
• Any channel. The code works on any gateway channel, even from someone who isn't on your Hermes allow-list. It's caught before the gateway checks the sender and never reaches the model.
• Hermes's downtime doesn't count as your silence. If Hermes itself was offline, that time is added back.
• Delivery that recovers. Each letter goes to its own channel. If that fails, or the recipient has no channel, your witness gets the letter to pass on. Failed sends are retried.
• Guessing doesn't work. Codes have six digits. Five wrong tries retire the code and send your witness a new one; after three new codes, codes rest for a day and you and your witness are both told. Five wrong invitation codes retire the invitation, and you are told.

See it work in 20 seconds: the rehearsal

A dead man's switch normally waits a month before doing anything, so you can't watch it work, and you have no reason to trust it. The rehearsal fixes that.

Click Rehearse it in 20 seconds. Psychopomp deep-copies your real setup and runs the same switch code (tick() in psychopomp_core.py) on a virtual clock. Each step passes a virtual timestamp (started + day × 86400), so the real code sees 30 days of silence, three check-ins three days apart, and the code request on day 39. Quiet days go by in a fraction of a second, and days with messages pause so you can read them. Every message Hermes would send appears on the page, addressed to whoever would receive it.

On day 39 you play your witness and send the code. The page then shows your Book and each sealed letter being "carried". Nothing leaves your Hermes, no letter is opened, and your real watch doesn't move.

The rehearsal works the same in any chat: /psychopomp rehearse posts one message that updates day by day (Telegram, and anywhere Hermes can edit a message), or the whole run at once in the terminal. You play your witness with /psychopomp confirm <code>.

Install

hermes plugins install ponzgpt/psychopomp
hermes plugins enable psychopomp

Or, in Hermes Desktop: Capabilities › Plugins › Install from Git › https://github.com/ponzgpt/psychopomp. The agent half installs into your Hermes, and the page installs into Desktop.

If a gateway is already running, restart it once (hermes gateway restart) so your phone chats pick up /psychopomp. After hermes plugins update psychopomp, restart both the gateway and the Desktop backend: a running process keeps the tools it loaded.

Open Psychopomp in the sidebar. A five-minute checklist walks you through setup:

1. Tell Hermes where to reach you: from your phone, send /psychopomp here to your Hermes.
2. Choose your witness: /psychopomp invite Leo (or the Invite button) gives you a message to forward. When Leo sends its code to your Hermes, Hermes learns how to reach him. He needs no app and no account.
3. Write the first page of your Book with Hermes.
4. Rehearse the passage.
5. Let Hermes keep watch.

Settings (Settings › Plugins › Psychopomp) are just your name and the days of silence (30).

From any chat: /psychopomp status | here | invite <name> | rehearse | confirm <code> | watch | rest | doctor | test.

Run it on a Hermes that never sleeps, such as Hermes Cloud, a home server or a VPS. A laptop that sleeps can't keep watch, and doctor warns you about it.

Hermes surfaces it uses

| Surface | What for |
|---|---|
| pre_llm_call hook | Heartbeat on every surface (Hermes's own cron jobs don't count), and the weekly invitation to write a page, added as context to a conversation you're already having (no background LLM calls) |
| pre_gateway_dispatch hook | Invitation and confirmation codes on any channel, caught before auth and answered there |
| Background ticker (one process at a time, file lock) | Advances the switch and the weekly nudge every 30 s |
| Bundled skill psychopomp:weekly-page | How Hermes looks back at your week and writes the page, loaded only when you say yes |
| Tools psychopomp_draft_page, psychopomp_write_page, psychopomp_read_book, psychopomp_seal_letter, psychopomp_status | Hermes proposes pages and adds them, and seals letters, only after you approve; it sees envelopes, never sealed words |
| /psychopomp command, with ctx.post_message | Setup, status and the rehearsal from any chat surface (one message edited day by day) |
| Transcript directive ::psychopomp-page{…} | The proposed page as a card in the Desktop chat, with Add to my Book |
| Desktop page (desktop/plugin.js + dashboard/plugin_api.py) | How it works, setup, your year in weeks, the Book preview, letters and the rehearsal; built from the Desktop UI kit and theme tokens, so it follows any theme |
| config_schema | The settings form in Desktop |

Disclosures (risky behaviour)

• Sends messages on your behalf to the chats you set: weekly nudges and check-ins to you, a code request and reminders to your witness, and, only after their code, your Book and letters.
• Reads every inbound gateway message at ingress, looking for PSY-… codes. Messages that carry a code are consumed (not passed to the model). All other messages pass through untouched.
• Runs a background thread (one per Hermes process; a file lock lets only one act) that wakes every 30 s to advance the watch and the weekly nudge. No network calls of its own beyond the messages above, no shell commands other than hermes send, no telemetry.
• Stores your Book and letters in plain text in $HERMES_HOME/plugin-data/psychopomp/ on the machine running Hermes.
• Runs hermes send (Hermes's own CLI, with the text over stdin) to deliver each message, because Hermes has no public in-process API for a plugin to start a message to a chat yet. That's one short process per message, and no other shell commands.

Develop

./scripts/check.sh   # invariant tests + syntax + Hermes's own plugin validator
ln -s "$PWD" ~/.hermes/plugins/psychopomp && hermes plugins enable psychopomp

psychopomp_core.py holds all the logic as pure functions (Book, letters, switch, rehearsal) and is tested without Hermes. psychopomp_store.py does the I/O, and __init__.py connects it to Hermes. The tests pin the promises above: nothing is ever delivered without the code, sealed words never appear in any view or log, and a rehearsal sends nothing and leaves the real watch alone.

MIT © Javier Ponz. Written with AI agents; specified and tested by a human.

README from the reviewed commit fa86a14; it updates when the author re-pins.