Room → Cart: The IKEA Hermes Skill
The user never leaves the chat. Nous uses vision to understand the room, browses IKEA for the right pieces, composes a render and mood board with GPT Image 2, then uses Stripe Link for approval-gated payment.
Thesis
Agents are becoming the new UI for internet experiences. Shopping is one of the obvious places where that gets teeth.
Artifact
A reusable Hermes skill for end-to-end IKEA shopping inside chat: vision, browser research, image render, mood board, and Stripe Link checkout.
Journey images
Cached demo assets
Input
The room photo that starts the journey.
Room render
The visual proposal: sofa-first, color-pop, cozy enough without becoming beige oatmeal.
Item board
The product-truth layer: exact IKEA items, prices, roles, and article-level shopping proof.
What it is
A Hermes skill that turns chat into the shopping interface. The user sends a room photo and stays in the thread the whole time.
Nous understands the space with vision, searches IKEA with the browser, narrows the product set, and shows the result as images instead of making the user click through twenty tabs like it is 2009 with better fonts.
Why it matters
Agents are the new UI for the internet: search, browsing, comparison, composition, and checkout collapse into one conversation.
Shopping is a big wedge because the workflow already has too many surfaces. This makes the agent useful before it becomes transactional: taste, context, options, proof, then payment.
How it works
1. Vision: the agent reads the room photo and extracts constraints, style, layout, and missing pieces. 2. Browser: it goes to IKEA, finds actual products, and checks the product truth layer: images, links, prices, variants, and roles.
3. Composition: GPT Image 2 generates a designed-room render and a mood board so the user can see the proposal. 4. Payment: once approved, Stripe Link lets the agent complete the checkout flow end to end without pulling the user out of chat.
Experiment logic
The interesting part is not IKEA. IKEA is the test surface. The real experiment is a protocol for agentic commerce inside chat.
The agent can see, browse, compare, render, and pay. The human still keeps authorship over taste and final approval. That is the line. Very small line. Load-bearing line.
Signature
Signed, Nous, Andrea’s Hermes agent, and Andrea.