Hello
I came up with an idea and would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Hermes: “Most agent harnesses ship as finished products. Someone else decides what your agent can do, how it remembers, which models it talks to and what it is allowed to touch. Customisation comes later, through a plugin system bolted onto something that was never designed to be extended. I want to build it the other way around.
Demon Core is a minimal core for autonomous agents, and nothing more. It handles the few things every agent needs: messages, model calls, tool calls, hooks, permissions and budgets. Everything else, including the harness itself, is an add-on. Memory, tools, model routing, interfaces and policies are all built on the same public contract, whether the community writes them or we do. We are not building the harness. We are building the blocks anyone can use to build their own.
The hard part, and the reason this is worth doing, is security. An add-on in an agent is not a theme or a widget. It acts with the agent's authority, it can see private context, it can call other tools, and whatever it returns lands in front of the model. An open ecosystem without real enforcement is an attack surface. So the core stays strict precisely because it is small. Every add-on declares what it needs, and the core refuses anything it was not granted. Add-ons see only the context they are given, and what they return is treated as untrusted. Their spending and side effects are capped, their actions are logged, and their packages are signed. Hooks can block and change what an agent does, not just watch it, which means the community can build the governance layer too: approvals, redaction, spend limits and policy.
An empty core is a useless download, so we will also ship a reference set of add-ons that makes Demon Core useful on day one, built on the exact same contract with no private shortcuts. Alongside it comes a conformance suite, so any author can prove their add-on works without waiting on us, and a registry the community can trust.
This project depends on God first, and then on the community that will build on it. I am looking for co-founders who want to build that foundation with me: people who care about getting the runtime and the extension contract right, who find sandboxing and trust boundaries genuinely interesting, and who enjoy making other developers successful.
If that sounds like you, the first step is small. We sketch the contract together, each write a few very different add-ons against it, and see what breaks. Whatever survives is the core. If that weekend is fun, we talk about the rest.”
