Hermes Second Brain

What Hermes Second Brain does

Hermes Second Brain is a personal AI hub built on Hermes Agent, with an Obsidian second brain as its first capability. You send notes and requests from Telegram, Hermes calls MCP tools over stdio, and a local core captures, searches and organizes notes in your Obsidian vault. The Markdown vault stays the source of truth.

Capture writes notes or links to an Inbox as atomic, deduplicated, reversible Markdown. Search uses SQLite FTS5 across the vault, and sensitive notes are searched by title and tag only, with their bodies left out of the index. Organize moves notes between PARA folders or appends to and replaces content with hash guards, and undo reverses the last capture, move or update by operation_id. A capability gateway limits access with permission levels L0 to L4, and an audit log records operations. The README is written in Indonesian and describes the system as live at Phase 3, running on a single Mac mini.

Key features

• Capture notes and links into an Obsidian Inbox as Markdown
• SQLite FTS5 full-text search with body indexing skipped for sensitive notes
• Move and update notes with hash guards, plus undo by operation_id
• MCP stdio server with tools such as capture_note, search_vault, get_note and update_note
• Per-tool capability registry with L0 to L4 permissions and an audit log
• Local-only HTTP Core API on 127.0.0.1:8787

When to use it

• Save a link or idea to your vault from Telegram without opening Obsidian
• Ask Hermes to find notes in your vault by keyword
• Undo an accidental move or edit made through the agent

Who it is for: Obsidian users who run Hermes Agent on an always-on machine and want to manage their vault from Telegram.

How it fits with Hermes Agent

Built around Hermes Agent, which handles conversation, sessions, model routing and tool selection while the repository supplies the vault tools over MCP.

How to install Hermes Second Brain

These commands are copied from the project's README. Check the repository for the latest steps before you run them.

git clone https://github.com/andrihakim146/hermes-second-brain.git
cd hermes-second-brain
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[mcp]"

Requirements: A machine that stays on 24/7, an Obsidian vault, Hermes Agent installed and running, an LLM API key for Hermes, a Telegram bot token from @BotFather, and Python 3.11+

Note: The README describes it as a personal setup at Phase 3, running end to end on one local machine.

FAQ