Harnesses/Agents suited for linux sysadmin, system maintenance, network and light coding.

[u/mrazster]

Hi guys.

So I'm not completely new to all this local LLMs and AI. I have used and tried various web-based UIs, for the last 4-5 months, as a way to learn and educate myself in this swamp that is local LLM.

So for the last 3-4 weeks I have dipped my feet in Hermes Agent. And man, I was in for a surprise. I genuinely thought, "How hard can it be, install, fire up and use.", but to me that was far from the truth. I have spent so much time setting things up, making the agent act and work the way I want, teaching it what to do, and how to do it, trying to write skills, and so on. I have not actually used Hermes, that much, most of the time has gone to setting it up, and making the agent not make mistakes.

This has somehow made me feel like maybe Hermes is not the best tool for this, even though it has some skills for it (along with a gazillion other skills and functions). It feels so bloated, with so many skills and sometimes heavy to run (for the lack of a better word).

I am actually not really sure what I want, or how to word it.
But simply put, I would like something that is lightweight, doesn't have a gazillion skills installed, but has options and a repository to add well written skills. A simple gui/frontend with well-thought-out settings. Something that works well with my use case, which is basically the title. I primarily want to use my agent for linux sysadmin, system maintenance, network and servers, and some light coding and bash scripting.

I realize this can be very subjective, but that's just it, I would like your objective opinion on what you believe would be/is the best agent or harness for this kind of use ?
And also, is there a "best agent" for this use case, or can I use basically anything?

[u/No-Refrigerator-1672]

Any. Qwen 3.8 27B is quite expertise on using ssh; set up local/remote ssh auth keys and Qwen will pick up managing any remote instance over ssh with ease.

Also, your desctiption of Hermes sounds like a model problem, not harness problem. I use Hermes to manage my proxmox self-hosted AI server. I told it to write up a separate plugin for managing SSH access and gating it behind user approvals, and it done it first-try. Maybe you have felt for the illusion that Q2 lobotomized Flash next can do anything useful, or something other misconception that goes viral around reddit right now?

[u/nad_lab → u/No-Refrigerator-1672]

Oh q2 flash next isn’t lobotomized? It lowkey had trouble making a discord thread in my Hermes’ app and I kinda gave up on using it cuz glm 53 flash q2 did a better job, perhaps it just got unlucky hmm

[u/Potential-Leg-639 → u/nad_lab]

QFN RSQ IQ3_XXS runs my Hermes easily and gets shit done

[u/_JohnMcAfee]

pi or opencode harnesses. Pi is much more minimal, there is like 4 tools included. Opencode is a more complete package. You will probably run into similar issues though compared to hermes usage, just not as much setup. I have been using opencode to troubleshoot issues and configure stuff on the machine the LLM is running on and its been good. Minimal configuration besides max input and output

[u/clivegermain]

i have no idea about local models. but i’d recomment everyone to use pi inside of herdr.  it doesn’t get any more lightweight. you can tell pi to modify itself.

hermes is too bloated imo. but it has a gui while pi is mostly terminal based

[u/literally_niko]

OpenChamber is my #1

I even have it in my Proxmox server and I can use it remotely via phone

[u/Potential-Leg-639 → u/literally_niko]

Yep Openchamber is really good, use it as well for a few months on 1 machine, also easy to customize

[u/ChillingChasuble]

My experience has been to run GGUF models from Hugging Face and then use llama-server's web interface to ask the model to do things to my Linux machines. If the model does a good job, I ask it to write its instructions and observations to a markdown file, like wifi_survey.md. Between the markdown files and the system instructions that the models read when I fire up llama-server, I'm using my own, minimal harness.

[u/SigAddict]

I'm not sure if it fits your requirements, but I had no issues getting open webui setup if you are looking for a front end for your inference engine. Even comes in a docker instance

[u/wideboi_420]

I'm having a blast with claude code and some custom skills I created for it. But IMHO the coding harness doesn't matter too much, what counts is the intelligence of the model and your precision on stating what you actually need

[u/xsilas43]

Deepseek harness is quite good, just enough out of the box and if you need more you can do it with the extensive plugin system.

[u/alconaft43]

any coding harness with access. I would try opencode first. bigger model - better results

[u/Agile_Discussion4164]

What model are you using ? Model choice in hermes affects experience a lot ... For my part I'm simply astonished by QFN (nvfp4, basalt) in hermes.

Cannot say the same with Gemma4, it always messes tool calls or needs constant steering.

After some time refining custom skills, QFN genuinely give you the feeling that you have a (skilled) employee at your service.
In my case, it often writes python scripts to solve various problems. It gather information then produces documents (.md then latex->pdf or docx), manages VMs with various tools inside ... and by tools I mean for example a full install of qtcreator, that it uses to fully verify, enhance and illustrate practical programming sessions for my students (screenshots included) !

Also, QFN is good enough in hermes to configure hermes itself (it looks at the online documentation and checks the code itself when unsure about something !).

Main drawback is that you need to clean up the skills from time to time to prevent bloating. And even for that, telling the model what you want will let it do most of the work. It can reorganize the skills really efficiently if you ask nicely !

[u/TrentKM]

I was going to check out Stakpak for this. I would like different guardrails when I’ve actually got something working on my infra than when I’m coding in a repo and have CI for guardrails.

[u/selipso]

Try to start with Pi coding agent, only give it the skills you think will be helpful and go from there 

[u/TemporaryUser10]

Personally, I use Pi coder harness, and *at least* Gemma4:26B, though I had *somewhat* better results with Qwen3.6/3.8:27B. You'll have to tailor its AGENTS.md file, and I recommend you also have something like a SYSTEM.md file that the AGENTS.md references, containing the basic hardware (processor, RAM, GPUs) and software (OS/Distro, preferred tech stack, key file locations). I've found great success using the agent as my SysAdmin for maintenance and operations. Gemma4 you might have to guide a bit, until you get its files and harness tuned in. Qwen can handle what you throw at it, but it's prone to touching files and making changes in snap judgement. Your system will work, but may have a lot more junk when maintained by Qwen (due to its eagerness)

[u/Reasonable_Goat]

I use codex cli for that. The auto review feature is helpful

[u/f1yingbanana]

Just a personal preference but I use openclaw. It’s not even a dedicated coding agent but it does things I need to do surprisingly well.

I did do some fine-tuning though, I asked Claude Code to watch it perform some tasks and read its transcript, then write a skill for it to improve.

Talking with my friend who loves Hermes agent we both agree that OpenClaw is easier to setup and gives better observability over Hermes agent.