Hello, Vylen

· The Vylen team

Most AI tools today ask you to upload your context, your keys, and your work to someone else’s machine. Vylen takes a different bet: your agents should run on your hardware, and the controller you use to drive them should be calm, fast, and yours.

Vylen Agent is a control plane for user-owned Hermes Agent instances. The job of the controller is small but specific: pair a connector, hold a single outbound tunnel open, route commands to your local agent, and give you a mobile-first surface to see what it’s doing. The Hermes-side gateway plugin is open source (hermes-vylen-gateway, MIT). The client app is a private project, public release pending.

What’s in the first slice

The first cut is intentionally narrow:

  • Pairing — a one-time, hashed-at-rest token claims a connector.
  • Tunnel — hermes-connect opens a single outbound WebSocket to Vylen Cloud. No inbound ports.
  • Health proxy — the cloud can ask the local Hermes /health through the tunnel.
  • Live status — the connector heartbeats; the web app reflects connected, running, or idle state.
  • Runs over chats — the model is long-running runs with status, not a chat transcript.

What it deliberately is not, yet:

  • OAuth/OIDC, teams, billing.
  • Production TLS, rate limiting, audit logs, tunnel broker clustering.
  • A streaming chat surface or job scheduler.

We’re shipping in slices, in the open. If you’re already running Hermes Agent on a homelab, a VPS, or a workstation, Vylen will give you a single, polished surface to drive it from anywhere.

What’s next

The next round of work focuses on the parts users feel:

  • Run controls — start, pause, resume, and cancel long-running work from any device.
  • Activity timeline — what the agent did, when, and with which tool.
  • Instance switching — home, work, server, experiment, with clear boundary labels.
  • Mobile polish — Vylen is designed mobile-first, and the Expo app is where the daily driver lives.

If you want to follow along, star the gateway plugin, open issues, and tell us what you’d build with a controller you actually own.