The Exchanges

Q know, installed OpenClaw. Um, You know, I, I'm just, what I'm begging to know is like What I don't want, actually, I should restart. What I don't want to have happen is I install Hermes, and then a week later I go back to Open Claw, basically. You know what I mean? Like, I just kind of want to pick an ecosystem and be like, this is my personal agent.

A No, it makes a lot of sense. Um, and that's kind of the problem that I was having before. I kept switching and jumping between different agents until I landed on Hermes, and I've been using it for over three weeks now, which in this space is a lot of time. Um, So I'll, before we get into the installation, I'll walk you really quickly on my setup. So when you just type in Hermes in your terminal after it's installed, um, it's gonna try to open up my Xcode MCP, which is not running right now, so it'll, it'll fire up in a second. Um, cool. Yeah, and I'll zoom out a little bit. You can see here, um, when you open up Hermes for the first time, on the top you'll see the available tools. So Hermes comes built in with 40 plus Built-in tools that OpenCloud doesn't have. So you don't have to go find out which tools to install. Many of the built-in tools will cover almost all of the basic tasks that you'll need to do. If you want to fire up a browser, if you want to search the web, if you want to create recurring scheduled cron jobs or like scheduled like code, um, it has all of that built in. Even things like image generation are built in, home assistant capabilities. You don't really have to configure or go figure out what the best Tools are. Um, the other thing you'll notice about Hermes when you first install it is that it has a lot of the really most popular available skills pre-inst…

AI assessment note: “Hermes comes built in with 40 plus Built-in tools that OpenCloud doesn't have.”

Q Okay. What are, what are other must know things about Hermes Agent?

A You do still have to update it every night. It's still technically beta software. Um, so you can see I haven't updated this one since in nine days and I am 535 commits behind, which is quite a bit. Uh, so you do still have to update it every single day. It is still technically Beta software. You still should probably constantly, you know, lock it down in certain ways. Um, a really simple way to lock down Hermes agent, but still have access to it from anywhere is one to set up like telegram or WhatsApp. Um, another thing that I highly recommend for any of these tools is that you install tail scale and you configure tail scale correctly. So tail scale will allow your phone and all of your computers to be on the same kind of virtual network. Um, and then you can remotely access them using any, like, terminal SSH app. Which just lets you kind of remote in and, like, monitor it and chat with it that way as well. Um.

AI assessment note: “You do still have to update it every night. It's still technically beta software.”

Q What about security? Like, are those, like, if I install some of those skills, are those, like, do I have peace of mind knowing that that's secure?

A Yeah, no, that's a really good question. Um, so there's a couple of ways around this. One, I think you can always ask the agent to do an audit of your security setup, which a lot of people don't think about. It's kind of almost like the meta prompting it. So Hermes has knowledge of where the keys are stored in your configuration. Um, and you can say like, is this a security setup? Tell me why or why not? And it'll go through and let you know if there are any secret keys exposed on your computer. If they're in plain text, if like a firewall is set up poorly, it'll let you know. Um, the other thing that's very unique to Hermes is that it's built to also out of the box be able to be ran inside of a Docker container in case you want it on your machine, but isolated from the rest of your files. And then you can also run it on modal as like a serverless service as well. Um, so it's really flexible in how you meet. I personally am a little bit risky and I just kind of run it on the bare metal. Uh, and I'm just routinely making sure like every day I'm updating it and I'm also making sure That like I ask it to, you know, secure my own setup.

AI assessment note: “able to be ran inside of a Docker container in case you want it”

Q That's awesome. Is that something that you recommend people, you know, use Hermes agent to help, help you set it up and, and, and productize some, some of the stuff that you're doing?

A Yeah. So I think like the idea of using agents to get things done is like a new paradigm. So the easiest way to like get used to it is to solve like personal problems in your life. So the biggest like personal problem that I first solved with an agent was, um, like figuring out what to cook at home. Because my wife and I, like, we love door dashing, we love eating out, but obviously, like, that's not, you know, that's not the healthiest, and that also costs a lot of money. So the first thing I did was I set up a local speech-to-text model on my actual computer, and I sent a long, like, eight-minute telegram voice message of me going through my fridge and my pantry of every single thing and every single ingredient that's in my pantry, and I said, every day, can you send me a recipe Or three recipes based on what's in my pantry and what, like, my fitness goals are. Um, it seems like something small, but it kind of takes a lot of, like, mental load away from, like, my day-to-day. Um, there's a lot of things, like, I think that if you start doing, like, really basic stuff like that, um, you know, like, we can, uh, you can kind of automate a lot. Also, we gotta, we gotta cut this out, bro. There's a lot of personal stuff in here, so. This knows way too much.

AI assessment note: “easiest way to like get used to it is to solve like personal problems”

Q Just cause I think some people don't know what G stack is. Can you just give a quick primer on what G stack is and you know, how, how, Why you think that people should install G-Stack with Hermes?

A Yeah. Yeah. So G-Stack is basically the way I understand it, um, is it was built for a cloud code and it was made by Gary Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator. Um, essentially the idea is that it takes the Y Combinator style startup process, which is like figuring out what works week over week, asking the right questions about what you should improve about your product and your business, and then helping you go and implement that as code. Um, and make decisions on that. So, um, those types of things were previously only available to people who were in Y Combinator, which was like the best, which is like one of the best startup accelerators in the world. Um, but now a lot of that knowledge has been basically open sourced as a skill that you can bolt onto your agent. Um, and that's something that like was never available before in the past. Um, so if you're obviously working on a startup, like an app or something, um, and you're, you know, not in San Francisco, or maybe like you're not familiar with like the startup methodologies. I highly recommend using something like that.

AI assessment note: “So G-Stack is basically... it takes the Y Combinator style startup process”

Q Right, so your, is your recommendation that, you know, once you get Hermes installed, post-install, start, you know, using it with Obsidian?

A I think obsidian is a really clean layout. Um, because if you look at like, if you look at telegram, like some of these just kind of read as like massive walls of texts. And even if I, even if I like, uh, organize it, or even if I put something in like my sole MD file to specify that it should speak concisely, like it just becomes really unruly and it's like really hard to find like the most important information. There are people that are like experimenting with building like kind of like mission control dashboards. Um, but I, I just feel like the easiest is like the one that you can see on your phone and your computer, you know.

AI assessment note: “I think obsidian is a really clean layout.”