I connected Muse to my home Ubuntu Server via Tailscale, and it stopped feeling like a chatbot

I think a lot of people are boxing Muse in as “Hermes for normies.”

My guess is Meta intentionally keeps the deeper capabilities out of sight because the target audience does not want a complicated Hermes/Grok Bot-style setup. They aren't trying to capture the nerdy Hermes using market, they want this to be an AI agent for normies but they don't limit it as such. What it advertises its for is far from what it actually can do with very little work.

But Muse gets much more interesting once you stop thinking of its VM as the whole system.

I joined the Muse VM to my Tailscale network, gave it SSH access to a restricted user on my home Ubuntu box, and now it can run commands and browser automation through hardware I already own. I figured out Muse can do this because I asked it if it had a Tailscale skill and it said it did, then after a series of "proceed" replies, it set it up for me outside of the parts where I had to join it.

At that point, Muse stops being a “shopping assistant” and starts looking more like a control plane for your own infrastructure.

With Tailscale + SSH/API access, it can potentially:

• Manage Docker, VMs, NAS, Proxmox, and homelab services
• Pull repos, run tests, build apps, and inspect logs
• Run Playwright/Chrome from your residential IP
• Access self-hosted or LAN-only services
• Use local Ollama/vLLM/GPU machines
• Run diagnostics and monitoring
• Process files on local machines or NAS storage
• Delegate heavier jobs to stronger hardware
• Reach Mac, Windows, Linux, and cloud machines through one tailnet

The setup is simple: Tailscale on both ends, a dedicated non-sudo user, SSH keys, and only the permissions Muse actually needs. No open ports, port forwarding, or dynamic DNS.

The bigger realization is that Muse is not limited by the hardware or software inside its own VM. Its VM can just be the control plane, while your own machines become the execution layer.

I can now be in the car, tell Muse to do something, and if said thing needs my Linux box it has no problems with it. It could literally pass an instruction to my Claude CLI on Ubuntu to start programming a feature, turn off the lights in my house as the Ubuntu server has home assistant, use CLIS or MCPS, etc.