I replaced the chat window for my local AI agent with a face

I run a local LLM agent (Hermes) on my own machine. The problem was never the model — it was the interface . I had a Telegram tab open all day just to talk to it: type a command, wait, read a wall of text back, scroll. It felt like texting a very capable stranger. So I built Ghost Vessel — a monitor-resident, video-call-style avatar that fronts the agent. The name is the whole idea: the ghost is your agent, the vessel is the body it borrows. It's not a waifu toy; it's a real agent client that happens to have a face. Here's what actually turned out to be interesting to build. The reply is a script, not a string The core idea is an output contract . Instead of treating the agent's reply as text to print, I split every reply into three planes: dialogue → spoken via local TTS data → code, logs, files → rendered as chat cards, never read aloud action → emotion beats that drive the avatar Emotion beats are inline tags the model emits in-band with its answer: [working] — the avatar puts on glasses and takes notes while a task runs [confirm] deploy to prod? — pops a human-in-the-loop approve/cancel, and the agent blocks on your keypress [happy] / [concerned] / … — fine-grained facial expressions So "run the build, and if it passes, deploy" becomes a little performance : it looks busy while working, shows you the log as a card, then leans in and asks before the irreversible step. The text you'd have skim-read becomes something you glance at. No runtime GPU for the avatar The obvious way to animate a face is live inference. I didn't want that — the GPU is busy running the actual model. Instead the avatar is ~30 pre-rendered clips , and the emotion beats just select and blend between them (blink-aligned seamless idle loops, a head-pose "settle gate" so an expression only reveals when the head is frontal). The avatar's runtime cost is basically video playback. Your GPU stays 100% on your LLM. The tradeoff: no real-time lip-sync. I decided a believable talking mouth loop + expre