Hermes

I have finally caved in and installed Hermes.

First there was OpenClaw. As a first tool of this kind, it was meant to be an ever-running agent organizing your life, connected to all the tools you have. We’ve all heard claims of how amazing OpenClaw is with day-to-day usage, and we all saw the damage it can do.

OpenClaw was the first, but it was not the most stable platform, and security was treated as a second class citizen for a long time. I think even hardcore users would agree with that assessment. OpenClaw, though, opened a door to agentic 24/7 tools, one of which is Hermes.

I must admit I was a bit skeptical of these tools at first. Having a rogue agent go crazy on your life felt like a violation of privacy. Yet I kept hearing how useful the tool is, and given I had a couple of hours one weekend I decided to give it a shot.

To minimize my exposure I installed Hermes in a VM. That was a breeze — it was a quick setup, all the dependencies installed without a hitch on a brand new Arch installation, and after connecting Hermes to OpenRouter I was up and running in under 30 minutes. I set the tool up with gpt-luna, which was suggested, and started poking around.

I fired up the terminal and started testing. First couple of sessions I used it as I would use ChatGPT. I asked it for some car production years info, a question on recipe ingredients proportions and a couple of random questions like that. The tool felt OK, responses were decent, and the bill was $0.01. So far, so good.

As the next task I set up a burner email account and connected that to Hermes. This has proven to be a strangely difficult task. You would think IMAP is easy, yet Hermes kept asking for some rather esoteric connection methods. Finally, after 45 minutes and $0.50 in costs, I was able to have it read the emails. This is where the real asking began.

You see, I have children that have school activities. And to the surprise of no parent reading this — there are a lot of school activities. Late starts, early dismissals, catered lunches, bring a toy to school day, wear green for St. Patrick’s, orchestra practice night. The list never ends. What I did is I forwarded the last couple of newsletters, and I did ask Hermes to find all information that is specific to my children and to add it to a Google Calendar I can then subscribe to. Hermes got to work, and in several minutes it wired some flows up to get this going. I asked it to check for new email once an hour and update the calendar accordingly.

It did that, got the event format to my liking, fixed an issue with duplicate events, and got the cron running. The process worked great, it was almost magical, and it all cost under a dollar to set up, and probably under a dime to run continuously. Color me impressed.

Since then I have had Hermes find some YouTube channels with a small audience I might be interested in, get a daily briefing on tech news, keep a tracker of my book reading, and many more chores.

This is very exciting. I am impressed with the tool, and already enjoying the philosophy it is built on, and the memories and processes it collects and uses. The response wording is to my liking, the tooling is decent, and the whole thing is very useful.

Now keep in mind I am running Hermes isolated. It has a dedicated VM with limited connectivity to the rest of my network. It has a dedicated email address. It has limited access to a single Google Calendar. It has limited bandwidth. I would not have it read my primary email inbox nor would I have it run any script on my personal laptop.

All in all, I find it quite useful — almost invaluable. As next steps, I am experimenting with model selection, and communicating with the tool outside the terminal TUI. That is a post for another time though.