NEXUS — Eric Manno

Dark teal wireframe sphere with a ring of connections through it, on a black background — NEXUS

Architecture

Personal server, always on, runs orchestration, task workers, memory, and dashboards. Personal laptop is voice in and out only. They connect over a private Tailscale link. — What runs where

NEXUS runs the Hermes Agent runtime on Linux machines I own: my personal server and my personal computer, talking over a private Tailscale mesh rather than the public internet. I designed the multi-host layout, configured the runtime, and operate it — directing the work instead of using an off-the-shelf chatbot product.

Longer jobs fan out to isolated background workers, each with its own context and toolset, then fan back in. A kanban-style board tracks multi-step and cross-session work: tasks can block, hand off between workers, and be reviewed.

Voice and Memory

MemPalace stores and retrieves context across sessions. Past decisions and projects come back instead of a blank conversation each time.

Speech-to-text (Whisper, small model on CPU) and text-to-speech (Kokoro) run on my personal computer and bind only to the Tailscale address. They are reachable from a phone without a third-party cloud voice service. The brain stays on my personal server. Ears and mouth stay on my personal computer — laptop audio never has to cross the mesh.

Prototyping and Dashboards

I use NEXUS to prototype ideas and to build and keep live dashboards on the Tailscale mesh that track the status of other projects I have in flight. One of those dashboards graphs the paper-trading books — equity, positions, tickets — refreshing on a timer and surviving reboot.

NEXUS also helped with the layout of a tracking circuit board I designed for stage props.

KiCad layout of a UWB tracking circuit board, showing traces, connectors, and the radio chip — Tracking board layout

Day to Day

The system has been very useful for solving real problems. I needed to use MATLAB on my personal computer and the two weren't working well together. NEXUS was able to come in and fix it with no help from me. Another example was when the same computer was having audio issues. Once again, NEXUS was able to come in, diagnose the issue, and fix it with no intervention.

I wanted a page I could check from my phone that showed how other projects were doing. NEXUS built that and kept it running. When replies on my phone went silent, it found the cause and patched it without me stepping in.