BackAnt x Hermes: steer your autonomous engineer from Telegram

backant-kairos 1.5 pairs Kairos with Hermes, the open source personal agent from Nous Research. Hermes is the agent you already message on Telegram (or Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, even a phone line). Kairos is the engineer that works your repos on its own: finds what needs doing, writes the code, opens the PR. As of 1.5 you run the engineer by texting.

What you can do now

Four things, straight from Telegram:

• "Set up Kairos on the api repo." Hermes installs it, logs it in, starts it. Your only keyboard time is one browser tap to approve a device login.
• "What is Kairos working on and why?" You get the current work and the reasoning: what it chose, what else it considered, why. Not a reconstruction after the fact. The record it wrote at decision time.
• "Have it focus on the flaky CI." Six steering verbs: focus, pin, ban, goal, pause, resume. Every directive gets an answer, followed or overridden with a written reason. None disappear.
• "Approve the push." Pushes and PRs wait for your word while Kairos keeps working on everything else. Hermes pings you on Telegram, you answer from the couch. A no needs a reason, and the reason is kept.

A real exchange looks like this:

You: what is kairos doing on api? Hermes: Daemon running. 1 open gate, last decision 14 min ago: "fix flaky retry test in auth.spec.ts - CI red for 2 cycles, pinned by your directive #3." You: approve the gate Hermes: Approved, reason logged. Kairos executes it on the next cycle.

No dashboard, no SSH session, no laptop.

Why this is epic

Hermes knows you: your channels, your day, what you care about this week. Kairos knows your codebase: its conventions, its failures, its open threads. Wiring them together took no shared runtime, no plugin, no API keys passed around. Hermes just runs the backant CLI like you would.

That is exactly why it works on any Hermes setup, not just ours. If your Hermes can run a shell command, it can run an engineer.

And everything stays on your machine: directives, approvals, decision records. Nothing about your code goes anywhere.

How to use it

You need macOS or Linux, Claude Code, the GitHub CLI, Docker, a Kairos subscription at backant.io, and a running Hermes agent.

Send your Hermes one message:

Run npx --yes backant-kairos@latest hermes bootstrap in ~/code/your-repo and follow the hints. Relay the device login link to me when it appears.

That is the whole setup. Then ask it what Kairos is doing. Tell it what matters this week. Approve the push from your pocket.

The engineer works. You steer.

Full technical writeup of the control plane design: Your chat agent can now run a software engineer. Issues: github.com/backant-io/backant-kairos.