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caihongxu

2 karma · joined September 18, 2021

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caihongxu··on Show HN: Palmier – bridge your AI agents and your phone
Good question. I think of it as scope control + action control.

Scope control: in Palmier, you explicitly enable/disable phone capability groups in the UI. Some are bundled according to Android’s permission model. So an agent only gets access to the categories you’ve chosen to expose.

Action control: for agent CLIs that already support tool-level permission checks, Palmier piggybacks on that. So even if, say, email/calendar access is enabled in Palmier, the actual tool use can still be approved per action by the agent runtime.

So Palmier is one layer of defense, and the agent’s own tool approval model is the second.

That means the safety story is much better for agents with good per-tool approval UX (like Claude Code), and weaker for agents that don’t have it (like OpenClaw). For those, the Palmier toggles are the main gate, so users need to be much more careful about what they enable.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

caihongxu··on Show HN: Palmier – bridge your AI agents and your phone
If you mean mobile-use, I think the main difference is the layer they work at.

mobile-use is about an agent operating your phone UI like a human — navigating apps and interacting with the screen directly.

Palmier is not about UI-driving. It’s more about letting your agents access/process/manage phone-side data and capabilities in the background, without interrupting your normal phone use in general.

It’s also a two-way bridge: not just “agent uses phone,” but also “you use phone to talk to/manage/schedule your agents.”

And unlike same-network-only setups, Palmier is meant to work when you’re away from your computer too.

If you are talking about something else, let me know.

caihongxu··on Show HN: Palmier – bridge your AI agents and your phone
I’d say they overlap, but they’re not the same thing.

Hermes is an agent/runtime you talk to. Palmier is agent-agnostic infrastructure that connects your phone to the agents you already use.

So Palmier’s value prop is:

give any compatible agent access to phone capabilities like GPS, email, calendar, contacts, SMS, etc. provide a dedicated mobile app for controlling agents and managing tasks, instead of only talking to them through Telegram/Discord/WhatsApp/etc. work alongside Hermes rather than replacing it

In that sense, Hermes can actually be one of the agents Palmier works with.