Enable the TUI Chat in the Hermes Dashboard

The Hermes agent dashboard ships with a built-in TUI chat feature, but it is not turned on by default. Once you enable it, the dashboard stops feeling fragile. Closed tabs, hard refreshes, and "wait, where did that conversation go" moments become recoverable. Sessions become an operating board, not a disposable scratchpad.

Here is how to flip it on, and a handful of prompts you can copy-paste to make session recovery boringly reliable.

What the TUI Chat Actually Is

The TUI chat is the same terminal chat experience you would normally run from the command line, surfaced directly inside the Hermes dashboard. You get the chat panel on the left, a Sessions tab that lists your history, and a single Play button that restores any prior session with full context.

It does not come pre-configured. You have to install and enable it manually, which is a perfect job to hand off to your agent.

The Easiest Way to Enable It: Prompt Your Agent

You can install it by hand if you like wrestling with prerequisites. The faster path is to let your agent do the work.

Head to [clearmud.ai/resources](https://clearmud.ai/resources) and grab the install prompt. It is free, and you can copy-paste it straight into your agent. The gist of the prompt:

> Enable the built-in TUI chat for my Hermes dashboard. Please install it and enable it by running that command. Make sure it is always on in the background, so even if our host PC restarts, the dashboard comes back online and the TUI chat is always enabled.

That last part matters. You want it surviving host restarts, not just running until something hiccups.

A quick security note before you go further: do not port-forward your dashboard to the wider internet without a proper security harness. Tailscale is the recommended way to expose it. If you are on Windows, you will need WSL 2 for now (a one-click installer is in beta but not ready yet).

The Play Button Is Your Recovery Path

Here is the trick that changed how I use the dashboard, shared by someone in the Clearmud community.

If you close your tab, hard refresh by accident, or think you nuked a session, you have not actually lost anything. Go to the Sessions tab. Find the session. Hit the Play button. The chat reopens with the full context intact.

To prove it out, I ran a quick exchange in the TUI chat, then deliberately hard-refreshed the page mid-demo. Sessions tab, Play, and the conversation was right back. Two clicks, no re-explaining, no panic.

Do not feel like anything ever gets lost. Use sessions as that operating board.

Copy-Paste Prompts for Session Hygiene

Restoring a session is step one. Knowing what you walked back into is step two. These prompts live on the resources page so you do not have to transcribe from a video.

### Resume with a summary

When you reopen a long session and need a fast TLDR before diving back in:

> Continue from where we left off. First, summarize the current state in five bullets.

### Write a checkpoint before stepping away

Use this at the end of a work block, or any time you are about to context-switch:

> Before you continue, write a short checkpoint: current task, last verified state, next action, and anything I need to approve before you proceed.

This beats trying to remember where you left off the next morning. Every time.

### Name your sessions

Unnamed sessions are needles in a haystack once you accumulate a few dozen. Ask the agent to label them as you go:

> Name this session [descriptive name] so it is easier to find in the Sessions tab.

### Run a wrong-session check

Before doing new work in a resumed session, confirm you are actually in the right one:

> Before doing any new work, tell me what task this session was handling, the last useful result, and the next action. If the context does not match, stop.

That last clause matters. Cross-contaminating two unrelated sessions is the kind of mistake that is annoying to untangle.

### Find a session semantically

Even from a fresh session, you can ask the agent to hunt for an old one by description:

> Find the session where we did X, Y, and Z.

It takes a moment, but it works.

The Shift That Actually Matters

The mechanics are simple. Install the chat, learn the Play button, keep a few prompts handy. The shift underneath all of it is the part worth paying attention to.

When sessions are recoverable, you stop treating each conversation as something you have to nurse to completion in one sitting. You can step away. You can hard-refresh without panic. You can pick up something from three days ago and have the agent brief you back into it.

That is the operating board. That is what clarity in your tooling looks like.

I am not an AI expert. I am building in public and sharing what actually works. If you have a workflow you want me to break down on video, let me know who you are, what you do, who you are building for, and what you want answered.

Clarity matters.

[Watch the full walkthrough on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9tyn8b6dqM)