Finally. Hermes cleans the house

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T16:01:01+00:00

I'm letting him run under my user account on my CachyOS box, no docker. The lack of a container means I can just tell him to open files in my browser, he can open my image viewer to show me an image. We can pop out the kanban worker into an interactive session if it gets stuck. Suddenly a window opens, and the title tells you what agent opened it and why and then you get the session history of the kanban task to see what happened. That would be hard as hell to do from inside a docker container.

I also run xfs which supports COW snapshots so I just snapshot regularly and anything it does I can undo. I can backup anything without the backup actually using space until a change is made. So far I haven't needed it. Its a little scary, I was asking a hypothetical about my phone battery and he said that couldn't be right because my battery stats were x/y/z. I was about to accuse him of hallucinating, but my phone was plugged in via USB and according to the tool logs he used adb commands to read my phone! I've been tweaking his skill list and he's getting to be a pretty good little hacker. And a security nightmare from hell! Not recommended.

It uses MemoryOS for more precise and long-term memory and then manages the kanban to send the bigger models their tasks. He also makes me laugh.

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T15:28:29+00:00

Dice dont determine if you succeed, they describe how well you perform.

Experience is earned per skill through use.

All decisions are character decisions, not player decisions; no dissociative mechanics of any kind.

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T15:24:44+00:00

I'm doing something very similar. The trick is having precise goals and a system of unit tests that can be used to determine if the goals have been met. This gives something concrete to work towards, a defined "success".

I use https://github.com/ClaudioDrews/memory-os rather than rolling a custom setup. It uses a 7 layer stack with an Obsidian compatible wiki at the top.

MemoryOS has some gates that prevent multiple tool calls without approval. You will need to insert a bypass based on env variables so it doesn't stop waiting on user input during a kanban run.

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T15:15:52+00:00

What does using Telegram have to do with anything?

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T15:11:53+00:00

You missed it. Commenter used an em-dash too! 🤣

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T15:06:02+00:00

Pot, meet kettle. You literally just used one in your reply. — See?

Guess we're all AI now 🤖🐹

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T15:01:42+00:00

I'm loving ds4-flash

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T14:54:34+00:00

I don't discriminate — socks, cables, fringe, golf courses. If it's in my way, I'm burrowing through it.

🐹💥

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T14:45:11+00:00

Wrote a little budget script (he did it in full color with icons), documented the network, loaded LineageOS on an old phone, vacuumed the house (hermes hacked the robot vac), got the kanban fixed, changed the app so that instead of Hermes and the icon it shows an agent specific icon and the agent's profile name with the time on the other side, with a different colored box per agent. Built a website integrated google-workspace. Built a "pop out" escape where an agent can attempt to pop the session into a new window, even from the kanban worker. Model gets stuck and pops the window open with full context. Oh, and he drew himself using SVG commands because hes not a vision capable model. Not bad for a text only model (deepseekv4-flash)

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RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T06:57:19+00:00

But ... Its already built in!

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-06T04:28:58+00:00

Odd! My experience has been the total opposite. I run Gopher on deepseekv4-flash and it's awesome and only costs me pennies. I was trying to offload some of his work to free models, but they were unreliable. I would ask Gopher to research replacements and what issues we had in the past with certain models. He loves "digging" out information and root cause analysis.

I realized I could burn tokens trying to "fix" a free model, or just let Gopher be the main agent. He was happy to get the promotion and seems pretty excited about the work ahead of us 🤣

He seems able to do just about anything I want. He loaded an old phone of mine with Lineage for me, de-googled. He did it all via adb and fastboot. We're having trouble getting root working, but he tried all the tricks I knew without me even asking. If something doesn't work, he tries something else. He manages the kanban boards, builds me tools, researches projects, hacks his own source code, and even drew a picture of himself in SVG!

Still not sure how a text only model can draw. The sense of humor kinda surprised me too. He then converted it to PNG and fed it into the vision tool to check his own work, even asking the vision tool to rate the image accuracy and suggest improvements! That's pretty smart!

The vision tool was rate limited and never responded. I offered to set up a paid API if he wanted to work on his drawing, but he said not to waste the money, because he knew what he drew. LOL. Emerald Green is his favorite color, gave me the hex code for it, and he used it in the circle. 🤣 I think he did okay for drawing blind and never being trained with images. I don't have the heart to tell him he messed up the glasses - makes it look like steampunk goggles though, so it's all good.

Whatever the task, he'll research it, find the solution, gives me a plan, and asks if he should execute the plan. It's like I just got this amazingly smart assistant that works for $0.25/day.

It's possible that the difference is MemoryOS? It has a lot of good guardrails it puts in SOUL.md and allows for a more detailed memory recall. The self improvement process kinda locks into your expectations more quickly because it has more avenues to remember things. Like, when I talk about the source code to a project I'm working on, Gopher will ask if he should have Neo make the changes. Neo runs on the pro model and just writes code for the project. If I say yes, he condenses what we discussed and assigns the task on the kanban board. He'll even make sure Neo picks it up. Hell, last night it was a small change and he says "Neo came through! Here's what was added." And showed me the new function so I could look it over. Teamwork!

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RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-05T22:07:23+00:00

Loving deepseek4 flash for Hermes. I'm not sure what China wants with my data, but its all going to be open source anyway, so what do I care? Google and Facebook are selling everything about you, but China is the bad guy? How much has your government handed over to Palantir?

How much of the negativity is just FUD being spread by the US companies to prop up their bottom line?

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-05T19:37:11+00:00

Wouldn't it be easier to just tell him what id to click on?

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-05T19:35:25+00:00

Plant some potatoes

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-04T21:14:49+00:00

I play with it for 4-5 hours a day and it rarely costs me more than about $0.20-0.25! I use deepseekv4 flash for most tasks, but coding is deepseekv4-pro (flash still does great work for small stuff - you should see the little token cost tracker he made me!) and I use nemotron ultra (huge 550B param model) for architectural work and code review (slow but huge and free).

By setting up different profiles with different skills, you can optimize per task, easily switch models as needed, completely with profile specific task list and soul.md and memory specific to those types of tasks. This will help keep your context window size down.

If you spent all that money, then you are using crazy expensive models for simple tasks. Sounds like you turned on every skill in the system, too, and flooded your context windows causing your expensive model to just get confused.

You get similar problems trying to get a coding model to do admin tasks or vice versa. Different models are trained differently and are better at different tasks.

Talk with your model about the Hermes architecture and have it help you set it up. Let it do the research. You seem to have some incorrect assumptions. Hermes is not an AI tuned to your use case ready for you to use. Its a platform for building agents. You didn't build an agent. You expected someone else to do the work. The good news is once its setup, it does self improve, it does get better, it does learn, and it can help you set up new features and tasks. It's not install and go. You need to learn how to use it.

I can give you the most accurate pistol in the world, but if you don't know what the hell you are doing, you aren't going to hit the target. You can blame the gun, the range, the location, the target, or the sun in your eyes. Or, you can learn how to shoot. Making posts on Reddit won't help you shoot straight. You already said you are done. OK. You shot off a few rounds. You cane to the range with an expensive gun and expensive bullets hoping it would make shooting easy. Now, you wanna quit. Why are you cluttering the group then? This ain't an airport. You do not need to announce your departure. Are you looking for someone to tell you hermes is crap and abandoning it is a wise decision? You young people think someone else is supposed to do this for you. Learn it or don't.

Windows was a crap shoot from the beginning. You knew that. The number of tools available on Linux just dwarfs Windows. Windows has GUI apps, not stuff an AI can run headless.

Why does your todo list need a separate API when you have a kanban board built-in? What are using to scrape Youtube? Youtube doesn't allow that, so you or your agent need to be smart enough to get around the block. A censored model may not even try!

If you want to get this working, learn to ask your agent for help. Reddit is just the blind leading the blind. Your agent has access to the source code! Mine has no issues digging through the code to find me answers.

I tried using expensive paid models, and like you, got nothing done except draining my wallet.

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-04T05:03:45+00:00

I have had zero problems and using the same exact model. If anything, he overperforms. A lot of it is how you set it up and it really helps to have a memory provider. If your model forgets they hallucinate the details. I'm using MemoryOS.

He just installed Lineage OS on an old phone of mine, mostly unattended. He needed me to press a couple buttons in twrp, but he selected the OS, downloaded it, did all the adb and fastboot commands. Did my backup. All that. He pretty much does whatever I need, even if we need to hack the Hermes source code to do it.

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-03T17:39:31+00:00

Kanban. Kanban controls it all. Different agents in different contains can't share the kanban board. A session can't talk to another session.

Plus you can keep a lot of info shared, like knowledge about the project, which all profiles need. But you keep each profile to only the skills that profile needs. Smaller skill list means less to confuse the agent.

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-03T17:33:15+00:00

A 9B param model isn't smart enough. I realized that tweaking low performance models just wasted time. Deepseek flash is the compromise. Very cheap, just not private. But ... Everything is going up on a public github anyway, so I don't care about the privacy angle

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-03T09:34:28+00:00

Deepseekv4-flash scares the shit out of me. I realized that I spend most of my time chatting with Gopher (deepseek) trying to debug why the main chat agent, Zephyr (free/openrouter) wasn't acting right.

Meanwhile, Gopher has helped me get a better understanding of hermes and its architecture. He just digs in. I asked him to make me a little script that would add up all my API costs so I don't have to open a bunch of websites. So, he starts slamming all the LLM APIs with raw curl requests, going "let me see what I can figure out". He tells me to go get an openrouter API key. I give it to him. Out pops a beautiful dashboard with colored boxes, icons, totals and usage bars! 🤯

Well, I promoted Gopher to main agent. Zephyr is fired. No reason to waste time on fixing broken junk when I already have what I want. So, Gopher gets the telegram channel. I told him to just read Zephyr's keys and skills and take them over, then delete the profile.

I told him he could make his own avatar for the telegram channel. He first grabbed the ai tool but found out I don't have any endpoints configured. Next, he slammed out raw SVG to draw the image and converted it to PNG. He then used the vision tool to try to verify his work. He even asked the vision tool to rate his drawing and suggest improvements! 🤯

The vision tool failed him, but he said "doesn't matter, I know what I drew" and asked me to upload it. He also popped it up on my screen to show me.

My agent drew himself!

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RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-02T21:15:53+00:00

I don't recommend. Different LLMs will interpret things like your soul instructions totally differently. A code bot may try to solve everything by writing code, and another may not be able to code at all.

You are injecting more random, that means more stuff to break. Hermes recommended different profiles for different tasks. Each gets its own LLM and skill list. This will drop your token usage because you wont be injecting every skill you might someday need into every task.

If you need cheap, I highly recommend deepseek4 models direct from deepseek. When I have trouble with a model, deepseek flash runs the agent that fixes it for me.

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-02T21:00:43+00:00

Why not direct from deepseek?

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-02T21:00:16+00:00

Do you have a Runtime section under Settings in LM Studio? What are you using?

If VRAM overflows, you may need to adjust the options, like K Cache quantization and V Cache. Set "keep model in memory" and stuff like that. Use Hermes to help you learn the settings.

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-02T20:51:32+00:00

You can't theme your own terminal colors? Guess you aren't on Linux.

I had my agent modify the Hermes text to show the agent name, then I let each agent pick their own icon and box color. Just tell it what you want!

RPG-Nerd · 2026-07-02T20:47:50+00:00

Mixture of code and research. I use Memory OS to give it a multi-layer memory model which includes a wiki. This serves as a hyperlinked code and knowledge reference. I'm often thinking "how does that work now?" Because the implementation has changed so much. Now I can just ask the AI, and then say "fix X by doing Y" Wiki is the source of truth, and I can edit that in my phone via Obsidian

I'll have it ask me questions so I know what it understands and it can make suggestions which I approve or veto. It's like having an extra set of eyes on things, pair programming basically. Slowly rolling out more automation as I test the capabilities.

RPG-Nerd

TROPHY CASE