I started trying N8N back before harnesses became the hot thing, even with Claude’s help though (I think 4.5?) I couldn’t really get anything useful out of it. Then ClawedBot became a thing. I was on the fence about trying it out, then came Hermes, and I tried to dabble with it and did a few cool things (learned a lot about getting a self hosted AI to search the internet 🤦♂️). Finally PewDiePie’s Odysseus app launched, and I got a burning itch (get your mind out of the gutter) to learn more about harnesses and the tools built around AI to actually make it useful in advanced automated workflows. I figured that if PewDiePie was building cool apps with AI to help with his workflow, I should build a custom app for my workflow and learn about the inner workings of harnesses to make my life easier.
So I started working on my own harness Hephaestus (Greek god of artisans, blacksmiths, carpenters, craftsmen, fire, metallurgy, metalworking, sculpture, and volcanoes) to be as easy as possible for my own uses with my self hosted AI.
Side note, long have I avoided doing anything with Electron, I don’t know why I avoided it in the past, I just just focused on FX with Java for everything for some reason.
But it’s nice getting the functionality of what I want in a harness and making it as turnkey a process as possible, REALLY makes me want to actually find way to incorporate into my workflow. But while I was going back and forth between obsidian (my favorite note app by the way) and Hephaestus, I was reminded that software should have as little friction as possible so the user will actually use it. So I decided, since all the ground work has already been laid, why not just integrate it into Obsidian?
Thankfully since it was already electron based, Claude was a breeze to convert it into its plugin form and it is now live in the community plugin list!
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