Vanilla JS mission control for a local AI agent swarm

What it does

Hermes Control Interface is a password-gated web dashboard for the Hermes AI agent ecosystem. It bundles a terminal, file editor, chat interface, cron manager, token analytics, and an MCP server control plane into one browser-based window. Everything runs locally on Node.js and talks directly to the Hermes CLI and gateway.

The interesting bit

The entire backend lives in one Express file (server.js) that the docs admit is monolithic and past 6,000 lines, yet it still ships a real-time WebSocket chat, RBAC with twenty permissions across three roles, and a zero-subprocess swarm monitor that polls agent states in roughly 100 ms. The frontend is plain Vanilla JS—no React, no Vue—just Vite and DOM APIs.

Key highlights

• Eleven-page SPA covering chat, agent CRUD, kanban pipelines, system metrics, and log analytics
• MCP Manager with start/stop/restart controls, live log tail, and in-browser config editing
• Security hardening including CSP without unsafe-eval, CSRF on mutations, rate limiting, and path-traversal guards
• PWA with offline caching and auto-updates
• SQLite-backed task pipeline (kanban.db) and filesystem integration for skills and configuration

Verdict

Worth a look if you are already running the Hermes stack and want a centralized, self-hosted control plane. Skip it if you need a multi-host or framework-heavy solution.