I reinstalled Hermes today. The first install was two weeks earlier and it didn't feel right. The agent was working, but I was driving it with my pre-Hermes mental model. I had spent eight months building my own harness without realizing that's what I was doing. I was routing every session atom into the Obsidian vault as durable memory. That was my pattern, not how Hermes is designed to work.
Hermes has its own memory system. SQLite session database, persistent across sessions. Skills and projects as supplementary durable storage. The Obsidian vault is the sovereign long-term archive, but it's not the primary session substrate. I was forcing my architecture onto a system that already had one.
So I backed up the work and started fresh. The backup covered May 31 through June 15. Seventy-five sessions. The live database covers June 16 forward. Both are queryable. Nothing was lost.
The lesson: eight months of self-built harness work is inspiration and prior art, not the operating pattern. Going forward, Hermes native memory is the working substrate. The Obsidian vault is the sovereign archive. Both stay in sync. The agent files significant context to the vault, not just to SQLite.
Sometimes the right move is to start over. Not because the work was wrong, but because you found a better foundation.