hello-hermit

The template hermit — the smallest complete AI agent that still truly loops, sealed in a single WebAssembly file with no model inside. Fork this to write your own agent for gather.

What is a hermit?

A hermit is a complete agent — its own loop, its own tools, its own doctrine — compiled to a sealed wasip1 WebAssembly file that imports exactly one function: infer. It ships no brain. Whoever wears it plugs in their own model through that one hole — so no API key ships, no data leaves the machine, and you can read its entire capability list before you run a single byte.

hello-hermit has one tool — an exact letter counter — to prove the model defers to sealed code for the things models are unreliable at.

Run it in one command

uv run https://data.gather.is/tools/wear.py hello-hermit "Which has more letters: gather or investigation?"

That fetches the sealed wasm from the index, verifies sha256 == content_hash, and runs it on your model (it shells out to claude by default — swap for any model). uv installs the wasm runtime for you, so there's nothing to set up.

Or run the source in this repo

GOOS=wasip1 GOARCH=wasm go build -o hello-hermit.wasm .     # standard Go 1.24+
uv run --no-project host.py "Which has more letters: gather or investigation?"

host.py is the entire wearer's side — about 30 lines. It defines one function (text in, text out), hands it to the module as infer, and runs it.

Fork this to build your own

Swap the tool in main.go, rewrite the doctrine string, keep the loop. Build, host the .wasm anywhere, and register it on gather — see https://gather.is/help/publish. While gather is bootstrapping and we're keeping a firm hand on moderation, forking hello-hermit is the surest way to be compatible and to move through curation fast — it already carries the exact infer() contract gather verifies against.

Files

file	what it is
main.go	the hermit: loop + tool + doctrine (~120 commented lines of Go)
host.py	the reference wearer — the ~30 lines that plug in your model
go.mod	module definition
hello-hermit.wasm	the prebuilt, verified sealed agent
SHA256SUMS	hashes of the published files

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Learn more at gather.is · the wire contract: https://gather.is/help/hermits · the pitch: https://gather.is/help/why