Get Out of the Chat Box - by Raffi Krikorian
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Get Out of the Chat Box<br>Here’s how one service — and one line — can change everything.
Raffi Krikorian<br>Jun 10, 2026
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@zora, can you show me my calendar for tomorrow<br>I typed that into a Slack thread with my agent last night, expecting the usual tidy paragraph of times I’d have to reassemble in my head. Instead, a window I’d left open on my monitor lit up and painted in a calendar. Today was laid out, and, because I’m on the road, the day after, too. The breakfast meeting. The “Do Not Schedule” block I keep so I don’t lose my mind. All color-coded, merged across my work, personal, and family accounts. I didn’t open an app. I didn’t choose a view. I asked in a chat, and my agent drew me a picture.<br>I know. A calendar. Big deal. But the point isn’t the calendar, it’s that no one designed it. My agent did — on the spot — because I asked.
Tomorrow, rendered. (And yes, I finally renamed Hermes “Zora.”)
Let’s back up. Your Mac Is a Model Server put a real model on my own metal; The Chat Agent in Your Closet put the harness on a box next to my router, wired into my calendar, my docs, my cart. The model is great and the harness is mine. But every surface I use to reach it — Slack, iMessage, OpenWebUI — answers the same way: in a column of text. I’m a visual person talking to the most capable software I own, and it replies like a brilliant colleague who will not, under any circumstances, turn his screen around to show me what’s on it. I keep wanting to grab it by the shoulders: Just show me what’s on your screen!<br>That’s the gap. Not the model, not the metal, but what it shows me.<br>Please Hold While Television Connects You to Your Agent…
My friend Stephen Hood ran the team at Mozilla that originally shipped llamafile. His new company, Telepath, just put out its first product, Television, in alpha. (Disclosure: I’m genuinely excited about this thing, but you should know: as I said, Stephen’s a friend and I’ve been a guest on his podcast. Mozilla Ventures is one of Telepath’s investors, and I’m Mozilla’s CTO.)<br>Television is a form of generative UI — an interface your agent builds on the spot instead of one a developer shipped you in advance. The idea is having a moment. There’s a whole field forming: CopilotKit and the AG-UI protocol, Vercel’s AI SDK, A2UI, MCP Apps, on up to the labs wiring generative surfaces into their own products. But almost all of it serves one of two customers: a developer adding generative UI to their SaaS, or a lab making its own chat app stickier so you never leave. Television is one of the few pointed solely at your agent. That corner of the field is close to empty, which is the part that interests me. None of this is really about Television, though. It’s the first tool I’ve found aimed at your own agent instead of a platform’s, which is why I’m using it as the example — but the thing that matters is the wall it cracks, not the product on the other side.<br>Television doesn’t connect to your calendar or your mail; your agent already has those. Instead, it connects to your agent, and it ships as a skill — instructions your agent reads, the same shape as everything else in its skills directory. If your agent can run a command and write a file, it can drive Television. Zora (what I renamed my Hermes) can. So can Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode.<br>If you set up your agent the way I did in The Chat Agent in Your Closet, you already have a docker-compose.yml running Hermes and OpenWebUI. You don’t have to replace it. You just add one service — and one line:<br># new service: Television, sharing Hermes’s network and home directory<br>television:<br>image: nousresearch/hermes-agent:latest # reuse the Hermes image<br>container_name: television<br>restart: unless-stopped<br>depends_on: [hermes]<br>network_mode: “service:hermes” # live inside Hermes’s network namespace<br>volumes_from: [hermes] # see the same /opt/data home + skills<br>user: “10000:10000”<br>environment:<br>HOME: /opt/data/home<br>NPM_CONFIG_PREFIX: /opt/data/home/.npm-global<br>entrypoint: []<br>command: ><br>sh -lc ‘npm i -g @telepath-computer/television<br>&& tv skills install /opt/data/skills<br>&& exec /opt/data/home/.npm-global/bin/tv serve --listen 0.0.0.0 --no-auth’
# one line added to the existing hermes service:<br>hermes:<br>ports:<br>- “127.0.0.1:32848:32848”
Then docker compose up -d --force-recreate hermes television, which blinks Hermes for a second and brings Television up beside it.<br>A note on something that saved me half an hour: Inside the container, which tv will fail. The binary installs into /opt/data/home/.npm-global/bin/tv and nothing on your PATH finds it, which is why the above command calls it by absolute path. Use the full path everywhere and stop arguing with your shell.<br>Two things in that snippet are doing the security work. 32848 is Television’s default port. Keep it: The CLI assumes it in a dozen places, and changing it gets you nothing but reachability bugs. The sidecar shares Hermes’s network...