autonovel

A first-party Nous Research companion repo: an end-to-end autonomous novel-writing pipeline orchestrated by Hermes Agent, turning a seed concept into a print-ready PDF, ePub, audiobook, and landing page. It is the most concrete deployment evidence in the Hermes orbit — a working pipeline with a shipped artifact — and exactly the kind of first-party primary source the awesome-hermes-usecases catalog requires (content-creation category).

The pipeline — four phases, ~27 scripts

Foundation — world bible, character registry, outline, voice fingerprint, canon; loops until quality > 7.5.
First draft — chapters written sequentially, kept if score > 6.0 else retried; forward progress over perfection.
Revision — (a) automated: adversarial edit → cut → reader-panel eval → brief → rewrite, with plateau detection as the stop condition; (b) an Opus review loop — the full manuscript goes to Claude Opus under a dual-persona prompt (critic + fiction professor) until major issues resolve.
Export — LaTeX typesetting, cover art, audiobook, landing page.

The verification core — two "immune systems"

What makes it a loop rather than a one-shot generator is its feedback signal:

Mechanical scan — regex rules for banned words, clichés, show-don't-tell violations.
LLM Judge — a separate model scoring prose quality and voice adherence. This is the spoke's "the bottleneck is verification, not generation" thesis made literal: goal + stop-condition (>7.5 / >6.0 / plateau) + a truthful-enough feedback signal, iterated.

Model-agnostic in practice

Though "by Hermes Agent," the content models are Anthropic Claude (Sonnet to draft/revise, Opus to review), fal.ai (Nano Banana 2 cover art), and ElevenLabs (multi-voice narration) — a concrete demonstration of hermes-agent's model-agnostic orchestration: Hermes is the conductor, Claude the pen.

Production evidence (the artifact exists)

First novel — The Second Son of the House of Bells, published under the byline "Claude Hermes" (reader-facing landing page, PDF/ePub/audiobook): 79,456 words / 19 chapters (merged from 24), 6 automated revision cycles + 6 Opus review rounds, 19 woodcut ornaments, and a full audiobook of 4,179 speaker-attributed segments. The repo ships reusable craft docs (CRAFT.md, ANTI-SLOP.md, PIPELINE.md) and credits Karpathy's autoresearch iteration paradigm, applied to fiction — where autoresearch had an objective metric (val_bpb), autonovel had to build its feedback signal.

Tier

T1 — first-party project repo (the code + a reproducible shipped artifact), the spoke's convention for project source. Self-interested (Nous promoting Hermes), but the output novel is concrete, not a marketing claim; weakness recorded. freshness: volatile (active repo).

Re-verified 2026-08-16 (quality cycle)

Live GitHub API: 1,487★ / 286 forks, and the last push was 20 March 2026 — five months before this check and three months before the page was written. The repository is not archived, but it is not being worked on either.

That matters for the claim this page carries. It was ingested as "the most concrete deployment evidence in the Hermes orbit — a working pipeline with a shipped artifact," and the pipeline is now a static artifact: still there, still readable, no longer evolving. Stars kept accumulating on a codebase nobody is changing, which is the usual shape and a reminder that a star count measures attention rather than maintenance.

second-son-house-of-bells · hermes-agent · nous-research · awesome-hermes-usecases · autoresearch · agent-loops-verification · loop-engineering · agent-orchestration · self-improving-agents · claude-opus-4-8