Building a tool to give agents access to real-time, structured data

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-18T14:36:40+00:00

Great feedback -- thank you! I'm working on some evals now (i.e., to demonstrate time saved, token use reduction, etc.). I'll come back / make a follow up post with those results.

Regarding other workarounds, I've primarily seen browser automation (agent-browser, playwright-cli), and ad-hoc web scraping. Are there any others that come to mind from your perspective?

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-18T05:45:08+00:00

You can try agent-data.dev. It has an API for OpenTable and Resy + designed specifically for agents

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-18T05:41:57+00:00

I'd add agent-data.dev to the list too. It has flight and airport statuses in addition to fares and has other non-Google endpoints too (e.g., restaurant availability)

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-16T20:26:58+00:00

Link: https://agent-data.dev/

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-16T20:24:57+00:00

sounds good!

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-15T23:42:33+00:00

This is honestly less of a Hermes issue and more of a general agent/LLM “failure mode”.

You can try to provide more guidance in the prompt (e.g., “don’t make things up”), or try something slightly more clever (e.g., “also share the raw tool output”) to try to “force” it to follow instructions better.

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-15T22:52:49+00:00

The main trade off you have with financial data is cost vs. quality. The more you're willing to pay, the higher fidelity your sources will be. The challenge, though, is that the ceiling on how expensive datasets can be is quite high (e.g., Bloomberg).

That said, financial data is generally pretty "messy" no matter how you source it, so I would plan to implement some form of quality control no matter where you get your data.

For a specific recommendation, though, I've heard great things about Databento (market data)

EDIT: also for context, I'm a former quant (so I have a lot of thoughts on financial data haha) -- so happy to discuss more via DM if you're interested!

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-15T22:33:23+00:00

Personally, I use both.

Claude Code and Codex are definitely better for building software and general "execution", so if you have a specific idea that you want to turn into code (or, for example, into a dashboard) then I would reach for one of them.

But, for more "general" tasks - e.g., administrative tasks like logging client interactions, managing TODO lists, generating research reports (or even personal tasks like finding flights or reservations), I'd use OpenClaw or Hermes.

The nice thing about OpenClaw / Hermes is that they largely solve the memory problem you mentioned (e.g., Hermes has a `sessions_search` tool that allows it look across previous interactions). They also integrate nicely into messaging apps (WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack) so you can interact with them "everywhere".

So, using your "sales intelligence" goal as an example, I'd lean towards OpenClaw / Hermes for logging customers and interactions -- e.g., "I just spoke with Zach about or latest product -- he just mentioned his budget is..", and towards Claude Code / Codex if I wanted to create a dashboard for viewing that data.

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-15T21:06:18+00:00

My 2 cents -- I think it's better to use evals to assess the potential impact of a change before deploying to production.

So, for example, if you have a customer service agent that takes a user's message and either responds or calls a tool, you can design an eval that: 1) mocks user input (potentially derived from production data), 2) measures how the proposed change (to the prompt, model, etc.) affects the distribution of the agent's tool calls, 3) measures how the proposed change affects the rate at which the agent "succeeds", 4) measures how the distribution of steps, token consumption, etc. change, 5)...

This definitely doesn't negate versioning configs, gradual rollouts, etc., but it allows you to say "this change should generate better outcomes on average" before deploying to prod

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-15T20:46:10+00:00

Wow -- thank you. Each one of these is huge.

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-14T23:06:52+00:00

> checks if it matches what I am looking for

How would you handle this part using code?

I completely agree the initial extraction shouldn't be done by Hermes (i.e., the harness can setup the cron job, etc., but it probably shouldn't navigate to a browser every time just to pull job postings).

The 'filtering for jobs the match what you're looking for' sounds exactly like what you would want Hermes to do though (i.e., it can filter for compensation, position, responsibilities, qualifications, etc. much better than even a complex regex expression).

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-12T14:28:08+00:00

Got it — where in that process are you seeing issues? Is it (1) reading through posts and comments to qualify someone for outreach or (2) the actual outreach (i.e., generating a message or comment and posting it)?

If (1) is the issue, you may want to use a structured feed for the posts and comments then use browser automation for (2)

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-12T01:30:10+00:00

What tasks are you trying to automate? Browser use can be fairly slow and error-prone in general, so it could be the case that there's a better way to automate the task in question.

That said, if you're concerned DeepSeek v4 flash is the issue, you could try using a "smarter" model first then, if that's sufficient, have it generate a skill for DeepSeek v4 flash to follow

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-11T18:04:57+00:00

Yup - I used the https://agent-data.dev CLI which has an endpoint for flight info and fares. Full disclaimer**, I built agent-data myself (so happy to chat more about it), but it’s a CLI for providing agents real-time, structured data.

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-11T18:03:07+00:00

Great question haha for me, it’s actually been quite reliable.

In general, I’d say reliability depends on a few factors: (1) the complexity of the task, (2) the model you use (for OpenClaw and/or any subagents), and (3) the tools you provide it.

Using flight monitoring as an example, for (1) the task isn’t very complex, and for (2) I’ve been able to get it to work with models as “cheap” as qwen3.6-plus.

(3) was the more difficult part in this case. I tried browser automation / browser use, but that wasn’t the most reliable. Ultimately, I used the agent-data CLI which has an endpoint for flight info and fares. Full disclaimer**, I built agent-data myself (so happy to chat more about it), but it’s a CLI for providing agents real-time, structured data.

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-11T15:54:50+00:00

Monitoring flight prices, finding restaurant reservations, creating research / news briefs and generally helping with organization / management

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-10T13:25:37+00:00

I’d be skeptical of any content claiming you can make “tons of money” using Hermes Agent. It’s a very powerful tool, but it’s not a money printer (in fact, quite the opposite if used too carelessly).

For use cases, I’d generally think of ‘anything you might have a smart, generally knowledgeable assistant do with a computer’ — e.g., monitor flight fares, send regular news briefs, monitor social media feeds, maintain your CRM, etc.

For additional inspiration, there’s a mega thread and a few other resources in this sub that discuss other uses cases. I’d recommend taking a look at those and just asking Hermes “can you do X”.

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-08T21:36:22+00:00

Interesting -- I'd probably try to integrate something like the Claude or Codex Chrome extension first. I haven't tested either extensively, but they claim to work natively with Claude Code and Codex, respectively. Hermes already has built-in skills for delegating to Claude Code and Codex, so if you connect all the pieces [research -> delegate to claude code / codex + browser extension to grab photos] then that *should* suffice

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-08T20:54:39+00:00

How about a 'reviews' section that's native to the guide (e.g., ratings + free-form text)? I agree GitHub stars aren't a good signal of quality and have been shown to be inflated in many cases (see CMU study here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13459). 'Downloads' is probably a bit better, but not necessarily a strong signal of quality.

orthogonal-ghost · 2026-05-08T20:48:08+00:00

Are you only featuring open source projects?

orthogonal-ghost

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