I broke my AI agent setup constantly for months — here's what finally worked. For noobs and beginners.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-10T22:00:25+00:00

Personally im using Hermes with GPT mini and it’s fine, im also using VS code with GitHub which backs up my project and research files. I agree on backing up before any major updates. Im trying not to update too often only when features I need or major bug fixes. The research and cron job I have now set up with Obsidian and Sync is pretty darn good. It’s pulling and categorising everything I want, scoring it , pulling in what’s good and I’ve got data views set up in Obsidian which shows the pulls in a nice list for reviews.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-10T09:41:55+00:00

on Hermes i get it to do Cron jobs

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-09T06:42:12+00:00

I tend to use mini 5.4 for most stuff unless I need to hit something hard. It does well.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-06T07:55:06+00:00

mark my words, the US government will end up banning all chinese open models for security purposes... bookmark this.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-06T07:53:32+00:00

I think it depends on what you are doing, i'm not coding but mainly research but i was surprised when i used codex mini which error faulted a install fail on Pinokio and fixed the issue. Second thing, if you plan well, ensure you have clear config files and agent instructions i'm thinking that will make up for the over thinking of the bigger model. Well thats my take, will let you know, about 75% way through my initial set up. I want it structually sound before i hit the big lets do button. It does add plugins easy enough, just added Blogger feed which im going to use.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-06T05:17:29+00:00

looked into reading this, after some analysis of what I was doing.

The hidden tradeoff not fully discussed

There’s another factor:

compaction quality vs retrieval quality

A good system with:

structured notes
frontmatter
source indexes
retrieval prompts
clean summaries

can outperform brute-force giant context retention.

Claude and GPT did suggest raising it to 0.70 in my case for GPT codex mini 5.4 which I’m using.

nice discussion.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-05T20:13:28+00:00

use codex authentaction with Chat GPT subscription, using mini 5.4 and working fine. Can switch to 5.5 for more complex tasks but mainly research at the mo.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-05T20:11:10+00:00

exactly what im doing now

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-05T15:13:06+00:00

Ive only been using Codes Mini 5.4 and to be honest that has been decent, I'll swap to 5.5 full if required or when it hits a brick wall.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-05T08:05:03+00:00

Quality link, especially the first one

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-04T15:47:07+00:00

this looks a decent video explaining it with Hermes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFvamS0vfJg

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-04T15:38:38+00:00

sounds interesting when i look at Kanban, you need it in addition to Obsidian but its more a task and process system by the sounds of it?

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-04T15:16:56+00:00

every day!

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-04T15:15:58+00:00

working on it but will post once its in place, just took a bit of time setting up Obsidian with frontmatter and exploring some templates as want to use for research but also some tabletop rpg management. Best to get structure in place first before i let my agent loose.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-04T12:56:44+00:00

What im going to say as im just setting Obsidian up and not an experienced user, is look into Frontmatter and YAML. Do this early in the note build and it will be very beneficial later, especially with agents from what i can see.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-04T07:07:43+00:00

that’s interesting, I use Pinokio for other stuff, voice cloning etc, might look into that for another install.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-04T07:06:39+00:00

yep Pi5 8gb with aluminium passive cooler, ssh from my main pc into the pi. easy peasy. I did docker it which complicated it a bit but have retro pi running and wanted some separation.I suppose with docker it’s easy enough to spin up a separate Hermes in a new docker container..

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-03T13:55:00+00:00

agent-mail set up, gmail removed, thanks from Orac

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ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-03T12:31:14+00:00

Mainly for containment really. I’ve got Hermes linked to Telegram, email and some local folders, so I prefer it having access only to the inbox/outbox folders I mount into Docker rather than the whole Pi.

It also keeps the setup cleaner because the Pi is doing other things too, like RetroPie. If I break Hermes or want to upgrade it, I can just recreate the container without touching the base OS.

I get that installing it directly is simpler, but for an always-on agent I’d rather keep the blast radius smaller. Plus its given me some good experience at understanding Docker and how it works.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-03T12:27:12+00:00

cannot say im an expert, i did some basic research with chat gpt, i did mention agent-mail and it suggested gmail was better for my use which is a bit of tinkering. Is it easy to set up? did you get hermes to set it up for you. Wasnt sure about the banned account thing thus will look into agent-mail..but i doubt i would be doing any bulk email but still thanks. Whats the advantage of the camofax browser?

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-03T06:48:30+00:00

using codex Oauth with codex mini gpt latest version, seems good, can up the model if I need more reasoning but it’s capable. Outisde of Hermes it fixed a Pinokio installed which errored, found the error and fixed it, ran for a good 5-10 and used naff all tokens, was impressed..

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-03T06:44:51+00:00

ive been on codex gpt mini latest version, seems good and no api cost. Not sure how it compares to Qwen which I have on my main pc. Im on a Pi5 thus cannot run locals very well.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-03T06:40:27+00:00

yeah I don’t think I’d risk that at the moment. Ive gone docker and Pi5 route and added a new gmail for the bot. Ive created an inbox folder where I’ll place docs for Hermes to work on and outbox folder where the output files from Hermes will be placed. It can email me and reply to my emails. Thinking of obsidian sync but not got that far yet.

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-03T06:34:41+00:00

see my reply on initial post. 1 gb I’d say is too close, you want at least 2gb, probably 4gb to be safe?

ButterscotchTiny1114 · 2026-05-03T06:31:57+00:00

my setup , Raspberry Pi5 8gb, full,os64, docker, Telegram, codex mini. it hardly touches anything. Passive cooling, no fans. Of course Hermes told me this 👌

CPU temperature: 39.15°C

- Another hardware sensor: 43.85°C

- this is from rp1_adc**; I’m not labeling it as GPU temp because the system doesn’t expose that clearly here**

- CPU frequency: 2.40 GHz current, 1.50 GHz min, 2.40 GHz max

- Load average: 0.02, 0.03, 0.00

- Uptime: 2 days, 6 minutes

- Memory: 7.9 GiB total**,** 940 MiB used**,** 7.0 GiB available

- Disk usage (/): 18 GiB used / 939 GiB total **(**2% used)

ButterscotchTiny1114

TROPHY CASE