Your agent didn't crash. It's waiting on a Mac you left at home.

Hook: I don't live at my desk. The approval dialog does.

I keep leaving the house with a long agent run going.

Not a heroic "I shipped from the beach" story. A Tuesday. Kid pickup. A walk. The Mac is still on the desk. The agent is still in the repo. And then it hits a tool call that needs a human, and the only UI for that human is a dialog on a machine I am not looking at.

The run does not fail. That is the nasty part. A failed job pings you. A hidden wait looks fine until you get home and find an hour of "running" that was actually one modal.

This is not a ThumbGate-only observation. In March 2026 a Show HN for Greenlight said the quiet part out loud: "The biggest productivity killer across all of them is the same: agents blocking on permission prompts while I'm away from my desk." (HN 47334316). In May, another Show HN opened with "I was stuck babysitting my AI." (HN 48295862). Different products. Same empty-chair problem.

I am not those products. I am not affiliated with Nous Research, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, or Fly.io. I run Hermes on my own machines, and I got tired of the approval living only where I used to sit.

So the thing I actually shipped is a control plane you pair once, then leave.

You open thumbgate.app. You run one installer. The connector dials out over HTTPS - no inbound ports on the Mac. You sign in, confirm a short code, and the machine is paired. Hermes still owns the chat. ThumbGate is the remote desk: status, pairing, offline policy, and the Leash.

Leash is the boring, important part. Approve runs the call on your Mac. Deny stops it cold. That approve/deny is free. Pairing is free. Status while the machine is online is free. I am not going to pretend a veto button is a subscription.

If you are away from a browser and you still want the same veto on the phone you already carry, Hermes Mobile is the chat + Leash surface for that paired Mac. Pair in the browser once. Approve from the device in your pocket.

What I will not do in this post: invent a download number, a rating, or a feature I did not just read off the live site. The live site is the source. Pair once. Leash on the paired Mac and on Hermes Mobile. Continuity - the paid piece - is only the fenced VPS failover for when the Mac itself is gone, under pause / ask / auto-continue. Live price on 2026-08-14 was $10/month for Pro Continuity. If you never close the lid, you may never need it.

I built this for the version of me that is never at the desk when the agent finally asks.

Pair free: thumbgate.app

Also available (stores)

If you want the phone client rather than the browser control plane:

• Android: thumbgate.app/go/android
• iOS: thumbgate.app/go/ios

Hermes Mobile is an independent client for a Hermes gateway you run. Not on-device phone AI. Not affiliated with Nous Research, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, or Fly.io.