Hermit

Spend premium agent tokens on judgment, not on routine execution.

Hermit is a cost-optimized MCP coding executor for Claude Code, Codex, and Claude Desktop. Your paid host agent plans, reviews, and makes the important calls; Hermit delegates bounded repository work—reading and editing files, running commands, and tests—to a local or lower-cost executor model.

It is a cost-optimization layer for agentic coding, not another chat UI and not a replacement for Claude Code or Codex.

Claude Code or Codex: plan, review, decide
                 │ delegate a bounded task
                 ▼
Hermit: execute with a local or lower-cost model
                 │ return status and result
                 ▼
Claude Code or Codex: verify and continue

Install and run your first task

Requires Node.js 20+ and Python 3.11+.

Hermit deliberately does not use the Claude or Codex subscription as its executor. Before delegating work, configure either a local Ollama model or one OpenAI-compatible endpoint. hermit doctor verifies this explicitly, so a host registration alone is never presented as a working executor.

1. Install Hermit

npm install -g @cafitac/hermit-agent

2. Choose an executor

For a local, no-per-token-cost executor:

ollama pull qwen3-coder:30b

For any OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions API, keep the secret in your shell or operating-system secret store and register only its environment-variable name:

export BUDGET_PROVIDER_API_KEY="…"
hermit configure \
  --model coder-small \
  --base-url https://llm.example.com/v1 \
  --api-key-env BUDGET_PROVIDER_API_KEY

hermit configure never accepts or writes an API key. It stores the endpoint, model, and environment-variable reference in ~/.hermit/settings.json.

3. Register the host

Claude Code

hermit install claude

Codex

hermit install codex