Shipping Side-Projects With Hermes: From Egg to Deployed
AI coding assistants are rarely pitched as the tool for small, silly, fun projects — the ones that exist purely to make you smile and teach you something. But those are exactly the projects where an agent like Hermes shines. They have clear scope, real constraints, and a satisfying finish line: a URL you can share. A concrete example is the TamaBuddy virtual pet (tama.fdhcl.com), an egg-that-hatches browser pet built almost entirely by a Hermes workflow.
What a Side-Project Actually Demands
A small web project sounds trivial, yet it compresses the whole engineering loop: write code, run it, debug it, and ship it. The trick is that the last three steps — running, debugging, deploying — are exactly what an agent with terminal and file tools can do autonomously. You don't hand it a spec and wait for a diff on a branch; you hand it a problem and it keeps working until the artifact is live.
TamaBuddy is a good baseline. It is plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no framework, no build step, no database. The pet lives in a browser tab: an egg that hatches, with stats that decay over time, so the creature nudges you to come back and care for it. Save/load is handled by localStorage persistence, which means the whole game fits in static files a web server can serve directly.
Why Plain Tech Is the Right Call
The instinct is to reach for a framework. For a side-project the opposite is better. Because TamaBuddy is static, there is nothing to compile and nothing to deploy beyond copying files — the same reason a markdown-driven news/blog generator works so well as a second example. Both projects run on boring, portable technology: files in, website out. An agent handles this class of work remarkably well because every step is testable and cheap to iterate on.
Hermes brings specific capabilities to that loop:
- Terminal and file tools let the agent scaffold directories, write the game logic, open it locally, and catch rendering or scripting bugs before they reach the browser.
- The skills system means the workflow isn't thrown away. Once Hermes figures out how to stand up a static site — layout, config, a deploy step — it can record that as a reusable skill and reuse it for the next pet, portfolio, or docs site. Side-projects compound exactly like that.
- Memory stores the small durable facts that shouldn't need re-deriving: the deploy target, the domain, the quirks of your setup. The agent that sees these scripts once should not have to be re-taught them.
The Loop
In practice a session looks like this:
- Describe the idea. An egg that hatches into a pet whose stats decay. Fine.
- Let Hermes build it. It drafts the HTML/CSS/JS, then actually runs it locally to check that the hatching animation, the decaying hunger/energy/happiness ticks, and the localStorage save/load work in a real browser.
- Debug against reality. The agent reads its own errors, fixes what breaks, and re-runs — the same tighten-the-loop rhythm a human developer uses, minus the task-switching tax.
- Ship. Because the artifact is static files, deployment is just the final terminal step: get them onto a server. The project got a real URL, which is the emotional payoff that keeps side-projects alive.
Where the Features Intersect
The features that make Hermes a serious engineering workstation — not just a chat completions wrapper — are the ones that make small projects painless. A messaging gateway means you can kick off a build from your phone and get a "shipped" ping back without keeping a terminal open. Cron scheduling lets the agent own the unglamorous ongoing work, like rebuilding and redeploying a static site when its source content changes.
None of that is required for a one-off virtual pet. But it means the same comfortable workflow scales from a weekend toy to a site that quietly updates itself.
Key Takeaways
- Small, fun side-projects are the ideal agent workload: clear scope, cheap iteration, and a real, shareable finish line.
- Prefer plain static tech — HTML/CSS/JS with localStorage — so the deploy step collapses into copying files.
- Hermes' terminal/file tools, skills, and memory let it build, debug, and ship in one loop — and reuse the workflow next time.
- Real examples like the TamaBuddy virtual pet prove the pattern: an agent can go from idea to public URL without the project becoming a chore.