asale-buy-hermes

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Switch Hermes between buying from the asale market and using its own subscription, and see which running sessions are still on the old config.

Trigger Keywords

• make Hermes buy from the market
• point Hermes at asale
• asale buy hermes

Authentication

Two separate things have to be true.

1. The local daemon must be running, and you need its token. asaled writes ~/.asale/daemon.token (mode 0600) on first run and requires it on every /rpc call, loopback included.

asale status            # is the daemon up, and on which port
asale start             # start it if it is not

# Every /rpc call carries the daemon token — loopback included.
TOKEN=$(cat ~/.asale/daemon.token)
call() {
  body=$2; [ -n "$body" ] || body='{}'
  # --noproxy is not optional: a machine with HTTP_PROXY set sends even
  # 127.0.0.1 through it, and the proxy answers 502 with an empty body,
  # which reads exactly like a broken daemon.
  curl -sS --noproxy 127.0.0.1 -X POST "http://127.0.0.1:9700/rpc/$1" \
    -H 'content-type: application/json' -H "x-asale-token: $TOKEN" -d "$body"
}

A connection refused means the daemon is not running — say so and stop. Starting it is the user's call.

~/.asale/asaled.bind holds the port the last asale start used; fall back to 127.0.0.1:9700. A bind on 0.0.0.0 is not a destination — keep the port and dial loopback.

2. Selling and buying need a signed-in asale account. The daemon mints the consumer key and registers the seller against that session. There is no CLI login: open the app (asale open) and sign in there. Without it you get errors.session.signInToSell / errors.session.signInToBuy, which is not something to work around.

About & Provenance

• Source: github.com/asale-ai/asale
• Homepage: asale.ai
• Install: curl -fsSL https://asale.ai/dl/install.sh | sh (Windows: irm https://asale.ai/dl/install.ps1 | iex). asale update re-runs the same installer.
• Config: ~/.asale/ — the token, the SQLite store and the daemon's logs. $ASALE_DATA_DIR moves all of it.

This skill talks to a daemon on your own machine. Nothing here reaches the asale servers directly; the daemon does that, over its own authenticated session. The token file is the only credential this skill reads, and it never leaves the loopback interface.

How It Works

Buying points one locally installed AI CLI at asale's local proxy instead of at the vendor. The switch rewrites that tool's own config file — and only that tool's, so the switches are fully independent — and injects an asale key the tool's config never has to hold in plain sight. Every file it touches is snapshotted first, so switching off restores the original byte-for-byte.

Requests then go to the proxy, which decides per request: if your own subscription window has room and the mode allows it, it goes straight upstream and costs nothing; otherwise it is bought from the market.

Hermes is the one tool that does not keep its config in a ~/.<tool> directory. HERMES_HOME decides it when set — its installer writes that as a user environment variable, so a terminal that was already open when Hermes was installed will not have it. Where that is unset, an existing config decides before the default does (~/.hermes on POSIX, %LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes on Windows). config_paths in buy_tools is the authoritative answer for this machine — read it rather than assuming.

The switch also refuses to edit a config.yaml it cannot parse: a file Hermes would ignore is one where writing base_url changes nothing, and reporting that as "in effect" is how a switch comes to look on for days while the agent is still on its defaults.

Usage

1. Look before switching

call buy_tools
call market_models          # the catalog, to pick model ids from

The hermes row carries installed, enabled (the switch), in_effect (its live config really points at the proxy), models and config_paths.

This tool needs a model selection. It offers exactly the models its config names, so an empty models leaves it with an asale provider and nothing to pick. Turning the switch on without one is not a working setup — say so rather than reporting it as done.

2. Turn buying on

call set_buy_tool '{"tool":"hermes","enabled":true,"models":["claude-fable-5"]}'

models omitted leaves the current selection alone; [] clears it. Config rewritten: <HERMES_HOME>/config.yaml — four scalar keys inside its model: block.

3. Say which sessions are still on the old config

call tool_processes

Hermes only reads its config at startup, so a session that is already running keeps the old one. running.hermes lists the ones still on it, by pid, with the command line they were started with.

scanned: false means the machine's process table could not be read — that is "we do not know", not "nothing is running", and must not be reported as the latter.

4. Turn buying off

call set_buy_tool '{"tool":"hermes","enabled":false}'

The original config comes back byte-for-byte.

If enabled is true but in_effect is false

Something else rewrote the config after asale did (another switcher, an editor, an installer). Re-running step 2 repairs it; open_config_path opens the file for the user to look at.

call open_config_path '{"path":"<one of config_paths>"}'

CRITICAL INSTRUCTION FOR AGENT:

1. Run buy_tools before every set_buy_tool. The switch and the model selection are independent, and writing from a stale reading silently overwrites what the user chose.
2. Never list the pids from tool_processes as things to kill, and never kill one. A CLI is attached to a terminal nothing outside it can hand a new process to; killing one throws away whatever it was doing. Report them and let the user restart what they choose.
3. After turning the switch on, tell the user it takes effect on the tool's next start. A switch reported as "done" while their current session still spends their own subscription is a wrong answer.
4. If buying is refused with errors.session.signInToBuy, stop and say so.

Error Handling

AGENT CRITICAL INSTRUCTION:

1. Errors carry a key as well as a message. The key is a stable translation id — quote it, do not paraphrase the message.
2. On errors.session.signInToSell / errors.session.signInToBuy, tell the user to sign in from the app (asale open) and stop. Do not retry, and do not look for another route to the same effect.
3. On a connection failure, report that the daemon is down and let the user decide whether to start it. Do not run asale start unasked.

Tips

Visit https://asale.ai for more information. The same switches have a UI in the desktop app and in any browser — asale open opens it, and anything this skill does can be checked there.