Do you recommend Hermes / off-the-shelf infrastructure?

I have been building my infrastructure and orchestration layers by hand rather than adopting something ready-made, and the main return has not been the system itself, it has been understanding exactly where it breaks. What I do not have is a clear picture of the wider landscape, so this is a genuine question rather than an argument.

What building it myself has actually given me:

- The failure modes first hand - I know where it breaks because I am the one who broke it.

- The repass - every month or two I go back over the whole thing, heavy at the time, and it compounds.

- No black boxes - when something goes wrong I already know which layer owns it.

- It stays mine - no dependency on anyone else's roadmap, pricing or decisions.

The repass is the part I would defend hardest. Every one to two months I go back over the infrastructure and the orchestration properly, and it is genuinely painful while I am in it. But each time I am looking at decisions I made when I understood less than I do now, and I can see exactly why they were wrong. That loop has taught me more than any amount of reading about it ever would have.

Doing what I do now, the only cost to me is my 20x max plan with Claude. No other non-self hosted models, API fees or anything. Just me, Claude in VScode terminals, and wispr flow. I am considering just experimenting with the likes of Hermes and co, just for the learning experience anyways - just wanted to hear from others and feel this is a good place to do so!

So the question, and I would especially like it from people further along than me who have experienced more of this. If you are running Hermes or anything similar, what did it give you that you could not reasonably have built yourself, and did you lose anything by not having built it - the understanding of your own system, or the ability to change it once it stopped fitting? Or have I misunderstood the split / missed the point?

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Do you recommend Hermes / off-the-shelf infrastructure?