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Igor Ganapolsky
Igor Ganapolsky

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A $10 VPS is not a Computer

#ai #agents

Cursor publishes engineering notes on cursor.com/blog with a date, a topic, a named author, and a read time. Related posts sit at the bottom. We are not affiliated with Cursor. We stole that format for a first-party post on thumbgate.ai/blog.

The substance is a falsifier we almost failed. Someone pasted an OpenClaw / E2B / Cua blueprint and asked us to assemble Manager / Factory / Hands on hosted Hermes. The mapping looked tidy: an economic router, a cloud runner, a “browser sidecar.” File names are not a product.

What the runner actually does

The hosted worker is hermes-cloud-runner. Its execute() function POSTs one prompt to /chat/completions and returns the assistant text. A grep of that service for playwright, cua, e2b, or openclaw is empty. That is Factory as chat, not a GUI sandbox.

The control plane can require a hosted browser sidecar when a prompt matches a cue regex (playwright, computer-use, screenshot-and-click). browserHealthUrl() is a health probe. Requiring a name in policy is not driving Gmail. Hands, if we are honest, is POLICY_CUE_NOT_DRIVER.

Presence of a similarly named file is not causation. If you cannot name the falsifier, you have a story.

Two URLs, two jobs

thumbgate.ai is the pre-action gate: evaluate the proposed tool call, block unsafe ones, leave a receipt. Local npx thumbgate init. Public MIT. It is not a general-purpose digital worker.

thumbgate.app is hosted Hermes on a fenced VPS: $10/month, 14-day trial, approvals in the browser. Give it a job. It answers in chat. It does not become Perplexity Computer because we added a Give → Works → Approve strip on the landing page.

We run a doctor that inspects those files instead of relabeling them:

hosted-computer doctor --json
# weAreOpenClaw: false
# factory.kind: CHAT_COMPLETIONS_ONLY
# hands.kind: POLICY_CUE_NOT_DRIVER
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

hosted-computer route "install openclaw" exits 2 (CLONE_FORBIDDEN). That is cheaper than vendoring a second product we do not operate.

What we did not steal

  • Cursor Origin / WAL-as-truth Git hosting. Client-side pack hygiene is a different steal.
  • Perplexity Computer connectors, Pro/Max, or months-long Gmail workflows.
  • OpenClaw, Eigent, E2B, trycua/Cua, or Agent S on the daily Mac or the VPS.
  • Invented traction. Cash is $0 until a stranger pays Stripe.

Nous Hermes is the agent runtime we host; we are not affiliated with Nous Research. The $10 offer is the fenced VPS, not a Computer clone.

Give hosted Hermes a job: thumbgate.app

Install the gate: npx thumbgate init — npmjs.com/package/thumbgate

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