SEAOTTER

Ryan Martin

Talk to your hosted Hermes from Cursor, Claude, or Codex

Connect a SEAOTTER-hosted Hermes agent to Cursor, Claude, or Codex in a few steps. No SSH. No pasting keys into every chat.

Connect a SEAOTTER-hosted Hermes agent to Cursor, Claude, or Codex with one control-plane key (so_…) and MCP. Start at seaotter.dev/connect. Full tables: Connect from chat.

Always-on Hermes is only useful if you can talk to it where you already work. Connect keeps the agent on the plane and brings the conversation to you.

Why chat beats SSH for day-to-day work

Hermes already runs on SEAOTTER—create, poll, run until status is running (usually under five minutes). The next step is one real task from the tools you use.

Copying dashboard passwords into IDE config, or reinstalling Hermes on every machine, fights that. Connect keeps the agent on the plane and brings the conversation to you.

The Connect path

  1. Sign in at seaotter.dev/connect. New workspaces get a one-seat org automatically and you are admin there.
  2. Pick a client — Cursor, Claude, or Codex. Confirm Create key. Visiting Connect alone does not create a key; you choose the client and create explicitly.
  3. Install once — Cursor gets a one-click deeplink (JSON copy as fallback). Claude and Codex get a terminal command. All three run @ryanseaotter/mcp-server with SEAOTTER_API_KEY=so_….
  4. Paste the onboard prompt into chat and run one real job: triage, research, cron, whatever the SOW says.

Full client tables and troubleshooting: Connect from chat.

Keys: what goes where

CredentialWhere it livesDo this
SEAOTTER access key (so_…)MCP client env / ConnectTreat like a password. One active key per client. Revoke from Settings when done.
Hermes dashboard / runtime credentialsAgent dashboard (reveal when needed)Do not paste into MCP config. The MCP server fetches what it needs after authenticating with so_….
Model / integration API keysAgent Secrets tab (or MCP upsert_secret)Prefer Secrets over pasting into chat history. Config is for non-secret settings. How Secrets works.

The full so_… secret is shown once and clears from the dashboard after 45 seconds. Treat the Cursor deeplink like the secret—do not share or bookmark it.

What “connected” looks like

After install, chat can list agents, talk to Hermes, and (with confirm gates) run allowlisted control-plane actions. Destructive tools ask for confirm: true. Hermes’ --yolo flag is excluded from the allowlist so a remote message cannot skip local approvals.

You still use the Hermes dashboard for interactive setup (model OAuth, WhatsApp pairing, full hermes setup). MCP returns a dashboard handoff URL for those flows.

Activation checklist

  1. Agent status running (create → poll stages → dashboard reachable).
  2. Connect key for the client you actually use.
  3. One successful chat or cron job that proves always-on for the engagement.

Provision. Connect. One job. One isolated Hermes per client.

Connect from the tools you already open

Purpose-built for Hermes. No VPS. No SSH into boxes for day-to-day chat.

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