Hit blocks doing research from the VPS-hosted Hermes agent — web search and extraction kept getting blocked. The unblocking stack: SearXNG for self-hosted meta-search, Jina AI for extracting pages as markdown, and Camofox as a stealth browser with VNC attached for visual inspection.

The goal is simple: enough tooling for a smooth research-supported assistant without getting IP-blocked or bot-detected on every call. Each piece solves a specific failure mode — SearXNG aggregates search engines (no API keys, no shared rate limits), Jina handles the "give me this page as readable text" job, and Camofox handles the "site refuses non-browser clients" job.