Editorial front door — Source Serif 4 + JetBrains Mono on warm paper, magazine-style featured article, live article counter that flashes when the canon publishes.

What it does

• Autonomous publishing pipeline. Three Hermes-4-70B agents and one Kimi-K2.6 long-form writer collaborate to canonize, draft, score, and revise articles about a simulated civilization. Pass → seal. Fail → revise. Skip-rate ~40% — the canon agent says no a lot.
• Real linguistic drift. Each in-world era has its own phonological rules and lexicon. karim (Lunar) → cherim (Cinder) → cherim-en (Ash) tracks a /k/ → /tʃ/ palatalization across centuries. Sample texts and inscriptions in every era's tongue.
• Multimedia by default. FLUX-illustrated articles, ElevenLabs voice narration with character-genome-mapped archetypes, mood-themed cinematic playback per event type.
• Provenance everywhere. Every published article traces back to the simulation event that birthed it. Critic scores (anti-slop, fact-check) on every page. Cross-linked canon. RSS, OG cards, sitemap.
• Hermes Agent native. 9 repo-local skills + MCP bridge (17 tools) plug directly into hermes-agent. One-command setup.

Live

960 canonized articles · 65 linguistic eras · ~506 K words
~1 article published every 2 minutes · publishing right now

hermesgenesis.world · /watch · /glossary · /control · /judge

How it works

  World simulation                                Hermes-4-70B
  ────────────────                                ────────────
  geography · factions · genomes      ┌────►  Canon agent (decision)
  day-by-day events                   │           │
  auto-simulation when queue empties  │           ▼ canonize?
                                      │       Kimi-K2.6 writes long-form
                                      │           │
                                      │           ▼
                                      │       Hermes critics
                                      │       anti-slop · fact-check
                                      │           │
                                      │           ▼ pass / revise
                                      │       Cross-linker
                                      │           │
                                      │           ▼
                                      └─── Sealed article + provenance
                                                  │
                                                  ▼
                                       FLUX illustration · ElevenLabs narration

Three agents, two models. backend/chroniclon/canon_agent.py is the orchestrator.

Quality gates that keep the canon clean:

• Slug-collision guard at the write layer
• Topic dedupe (Jaccard ≥ 0.7) before canonization
• Publish floor: anti-slop ≥ 0.55 + fact-check ≥ 0.55 (after one revision attempt)
• Slug-dedup at the list endpoint

See it

Article — drop cap, FLUX hero, ElevenLabs narration, critic scores	Glossary — alphabetized lexicon across in-world eras
Control Room — canon agent → writer → critics → illustrator → narrator, live	/watch — full-screen mood-themed playback against the liveliest world

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/Ridwannurudeen/hermes-genesis
cd hermes-genesis
cp .env.example .env       # add NOUS_API_KEY (and optional KIMI / OPENAI / ELEVENLABS keys)
docker compose up -d       # http://localhost:8003

Or skip setup — the live deployment is the canonical artifact.

# Backend
cd backend
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env
uvicorn main:app --reload --port 8003

# Frontend
cd frontend
npm install && npm run dev

Hermes Agent integration

Ships as 9 hermes-agent skills + an MCP bridge with 18 tools + a one-command setup:

./setup-hermes-agent.sh                                  # local
./setup-hermes-agent.sh https://hermesgenesis.world      # remote

MCP bridge auto-discovered by hermes-agent via stdio:

genesis_create_world      genesis_list_worlds      genesis_get_world
genesis_simulate          genesis_intervene        genesis_agent_start
genesis_agent_stop        genesis_agent_status     genesis_chat
genesis_council           genesis_chronicle        chronicle_stats
chronicle_list_articles   chronicle_get_article    chronicle_render_audio
chronicle_render_image    chronicle_control_backlog
… 1 more

Source: mcp-bridge/server.mjs · hermes-agent-demo.py.

Stack

Backend — FastAPI · 60+ endpoints · SSE streaming · file-locked atomic JSON store · 133 tests Frontend — React 18 · Source Serif 4 + JetBrains Mono · strict editorial palette · D3 · Framer Motion · 16 tests (vitest) Infra — Docker Compose (web + canon-runner) · nginx + certbot · GitHub Actions CI

Demo film

A 100-second editorial demo accompanies the X submission — programmatic React composition (Remotion) rendered to mp4. Live counter cold-open, three-agent pipeline visualisation, real-history seed test, full-screen cinematic mode showcase, hermes-agent skill grid, and a closing counter to prove autonomy. ElevenLabs Antoni narration over a Kevin MacLeod (CC-BY-3.0) music bed; Seraphina takes the floor for 20 seconds during the cinematic beat. Video is the canonical artifact; source composition lives outside this repo.

Why Hermes-4-70B

Two reasons the canon stack runs on Hermes specifically, not a hosted alternative:

1. Uncensored creative reasoning. The canon agent makes brutal calls — kills characters, ends dynasties, cancels prophecies. A safety-tuned model refuses these and the encyclopedia goes flat.
2. Open-weight agentic tool-use. The MCP bridge invokes Hermes as a tool-calling model. Hermes-4-70B holds its tool-call schema across long, stateful loops; we self-host it without depending on a closed API for the agent loop.

Kimi-K2.6 carries the long-form writing because of its 256 K context — the writer sees ~50 prior canon excerpts when drafting any article.

Numbers from the live API

$ curl -s https://hermesgenesis.world/api/chronicle/stats
{
  "article_count":     960,
  "total_words":       506219,
  "era_count":         66,
  "current_era":       "The Cinder Era",
  "linguistic_eras":   65,
  "subscriber_count":  2,
  "last_canon_write":  "2026-05-01T07:07:28+00:00"
}

3 worlds running on the production VPS. The longest-running (Lunar Epistles) is on day 990. All events, all characters, all faction dynamics: autonomous. No scripting.

What makes this different

The category as we frame it: autonomous publishing of fictional canon with cross-temporal coherence and linguistic drift. See docs/PAPER_OUTLINE.md for the workshop-paper framing.

Roadmap

Built for the NousResearch Hermes Agent Hackathon

Hermes Genesis demonstrates what Hermes Agent can do when given full creative control over a living world. The World Master implements hermes-agent's observe→reason→act pattern, repo-local skills integrate with the framework, and the MCP bridge connects every layer of the simulation to hermes-agent's tool ecosystem.

License

MIT.

Demo-film music: Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.