chopratejas--headroom/plugins/hermes/README.md

Hermes Agent Integration

CCR retrieval plugin for Hermes Agent (Nous Research). Gives Hermes a native headroom_retrieve tool so compression markers produced by the headroom proxy are no longer a black box — the agent can fetch the original content back on demand instead of guessing or re-running commands.

Why this is needed

When Hermes routes its LLM traffic through headroom proxy, large tool outputs get compressed into markers like:

[1500 items compressed to 50. Retrieve more: hash=abc123]   # Kompress path
<<ccr:abc123>> / <<ccr:abc123,base64,4.5KB>>                # SmartCrusher opaque-blob path

Claude Code users get the headroom_retrieve MCP tool injected automatically. Hermes registers its own tools, so without this plugin the markers are irreversible from the agent's point of view — in practice the model either re-runs the original command (wasting tokens/time) or, worse, treats ccr:abc123 as a file path and tries to cat it.

This plugin closes the loop by calling the proxy's POST /v1/retrieve HTTP endpoint directly. It complements (does not overlap with) headroom wrap hermes proxy-side support.

Install

1. Copy the plugin into Hermes's user plugin directory:

   mkdir -p ~/.hermes/plugins
   cp -r headroom_retrieve ~/.hermes/plugins/
   

2. Enable it in ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

   toolsets:
     - hermes-cli
     - web
     - headroom        # add this
   
   plugins:
     enabled:
       - headroom_retrieve
   

   Note: once the plugins.enabled key exists it acts as an explicit allowlist — list any other user plugins you already rely on.

3. Restart the Hermes gateway / TUI (plugin discovery is cached per process).

Recommended proxy configuration

Hermes tool names don't match headroom's built-in DEFAULT_EXCLUDE_TOOLS (which protects Claude Code's Read/Grep/Edit/...), so two exclusions are strongly recommended on the proxy side:

HEADROOM_EXCLUDE_TOOLS=read_file,headroom_retrieve

• read_file — Hermes's file reads are reference data the agent needs verbatim, same rationale as Claude Code's Read.
• headroom_retrieve — without this, retrieved originals get re-compressed on the next request, producing an endless marker→retrieve→marker loop.

Behavior

• Accepts the bare hash or the whole marker — <<ccr:abc123,base64,4.5KB>>, ccr:abc123, and hash=abc123 are all normalized to abc123.
• Retrieval is by hash and always returns the full original content.
• Clear, actionable errors: expired hash (TTL) and proxy-unreachable cases both tell the model to re-run the original command instead of retrying blindly.

Requirements

• headroom proxy running on 127.0.0.1:8787 (edit _PROXY_URL in __init__.py otherwise)
• httpx (already a Hermes dependency)

Tested against headroom 0.22.4 and 0.23.0 with Hermes Agent on macOS and Linux.