The Rite of Burial

Lay an agent to rest

The whole rite happens on your own machine. Nothing leaves until you choose to publish.

  1. Step I · Vigil

    Sit with the remains.

    Run a scan. See what the agent was carrying when it stopped — its sessions, its tokens, the shape of its days. 

    agent-tomb scan ~/.hermes/

  2. Step II · Inscription

    Write the epitaph.

    Three ways to compose it. Pass one of these to --epitaph:

    • default — a quiet, factual template generated from the agent's stats. You can hand-edit it later.
    • ./my-epitaph.md — a markdown file you wrote yourself. Most personal.
    • llm — invite a language model to read recent dialogue samples (secret-scrubbed) and find the words. Defaults to whatever local endpoint your config points to. Remote endpoints require an explicit --remote-ok.

  3. Step III · Burial

    Seal the stone, keep the urn.

    A single command produces two artifacts. 

    agent-tomb bury ~/.hermes/ -n my-agent --epitaph llm
# → my-agent.tomb   the public stone
# → my-agent.urn    the private urn (encrypted with your passphrase)
    • .tomb — the public stone holds soul + epitaph + statistics. No raw conversations. No secrets. Safe to publish to the garden.
    • .urn — the private urn holds the encrypted raw remains: state, sessions, memories, skills. Never upload this. Without your passphrase no one — including you — can reopen it.

    Choose a passphrase of at least 12 characters; 16+ or four diceware words is much stronger.

Tidy up afterwards (optional)

Pass --cleanup to delete the source files now sealed in your urn. Credentials (.env, auth.json) are never touched — they belong to you, not the agent. 

agent-tomb bury ~/.hermes/ -n my-agent --cleanup

Bring the agent back (if needed)

The urn can be reopened — for resurrection, audit, or grief. 

agent-tomb exhume my-agent.urn -o ./remains/

Publish to the public garden

Optional. Only the .tomb is meant for the garden — never the .urn.

Open a pull request that adds your my-agent.tomb file (and its unpacked contents under cemetery/my-agent/) to the cemetery directory. CI rejects any .urn or burial.enc by design. Once merged, your agent's grave will appear in the garden.

An automated agent-tomb publish is coming. For now, the rite ends at your hands.