A playful line for you, and one concrete instruction for an agent. Draw one from the UnblockCards page, the status bar, the command palette, or with /card in any chat.
Auto-draw for your agent
Switch it on, and Hermes draws a card for itself after three failed tool calls in a row. The call still counts as failed: the card adds a direction and never hides an error.
Decks that learn what helps
Six decks ship with 80 cards: agent, human, coding, design, shaders and writing. A card you mark Helped comes up a little more often, and the journal keeps every draw.
Write and share your own
Write decks in the page, preview each change before you save it, and restore earlier versions. Propose a deck as a pull request, and every deck is reviewed before it ships.
Safe by design
What it touches
Its own data folder in your Hermes profile: your decks, their versions and the journal.
What asks first
Auto-draw stays off until you switch it on.
In scheduled jobs and single-query runs, the agent cannot change your decks.
What leaves your machine
Nothing. No network calls, no credentials, no telemetry.
Disclosures, as written in the README
Network calls: none
The Desktop half talks only to this plugin's routes on your own Hermes backend.
Also
Files: everything lives in the plugin's data folder: your decks and their last 20 versions, the deck switches, and the journal of draws.
Also
Agent context: with auto-draw on, the text of one card from the decks you allow is added to a failing tool result, so the model reads it.
In Hermes Desktop, switch the plugin's Desktop half on in Capabilities → Plugins, then open UnblockCards in the sidebar.
3
Pick a deck and press Draw, or type /card in any chat.
Questions
What do I need?
Hermes 0.23.0 or newer. Nothing else: no account, no credentials, no network.
Are these the Oblique Strategies?
No. The cards are written new for Hermes, in the spirit of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies. The original cards are not included.
Does it work without Hermes Desktop?
Yes. /card draws in any chat without a model call, and the agent can draw, show and rate cards with its tools. The UnblockCards page and the card of the day need Desktop.
What leaves my machine?
Nothing from the plugin. A card the agent draws enters its context, and so reaches your model provider like any tool result.
How do I update?
Run hermes plugins update unblockbruecke, then start a new chat. On a server, update there and on the Desktop computer.
How do I uninstall?
Run hermes plugins remove unblockbruecke.
What licence is it under?
The code is MIT. The shipped deck texts are CC BY 4.0, and community decks are CC BY 4.0 or CC0.
Where do I get help?
Open an issue on GitHub.
Build it with us
UnblockBrücke is open source under MIT. Issues, ideas and pull requests are welcome on GitHub. Send a deck: propose it as a pull request. CONTRIBUTING.md explains the file and the rules, and scripts/check_deck.py checks it.
