Hermes trial slice 1: Stage A guard scaffolding and canonical-home pivot

[bnivanov]

Summary

Draft PR for the first Hermes trial slice in omp-guard.

This is not ready to merge and does not enable always-on autonomy, gateway persistence, cron, LaunchAgent, workers, browser automation, MCP, GitHub write, developer execution, or external publishing.

Current direction

After the 2 July 2026 testing session, Stage A has pivoted to canonical Hermes state:

• Hermes Desktop and CLI keep using the account-level Hermes state under /Users/agentlab/.hermes.
• hermes-light --profile ... is treated as a guard identity, policy, and logging selector by default.
• The earlier profile-local Hermes runtime model is retained only as advanced/debug direction.
• Stage A remains single-profile, manual, and non-autonomous.

Current state

Validated:

• Hermes Desktop works inside the standard agentlab account.
• Hermes project anchoring works under /Users/agentlab/AgentWork/projects.
• hermes-light --profile chief-of-staff --version can launch quickly in canonical-home mode.
• launch logs show canonical mode, project cwd, Seatbelt status, egress proxy status, and token-scrub status.

Not yet validated as a clean Stage A pass:

• guarded interactive hermes-light with Seatbelt and egress proxy is not yet stable enough to rely on.
• the latest interactive run was slow and produced a connection error.
• synthetic tests and --version are not sufficient acceptance criteria.

Required before merge

• keep this PR as draft;
• add a deliberate Stage A simplification and validation patch;
• keep canonical Hermes state as the default Stage A mode;
• keep profile-local runtime mode as advanced/debug only;
• preserve project-root enforcement, token scrubbing, launch logging, and egress controls;
• add explicit provider-connectivity validation;
• replace brittle smoke tests with real interactive launch validation;
• document the weaker Seatbelt-off fallback for controlled learning.

Stop-point note

See docs/progress/hermes-stage-a-pivot-and-stop-point-2026-07-02.md for the current decision record and next-step plan.