Hermes Agent App Clearly Explained (and how to use it)

In this episode, I sit down with Alex Finn for a full, screen-shared walkthrough of Hermes Desktop, the new desktop home for the Hermes AI agent. I open with a clear challenge: by the end, sell me on installing Hermes Desktop, show me real ways to make money and stay productive, and explain his move from OpenClaw. Alex tours every major surface — sessions, profiles, artifacts, skills, cron jobs, and sub-agents — and shares money-saving tactics at each step. We close on the idea that matters most to me: aiming these agents at other people's challenges as the clearest path to real value. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 04:04 – Sessions and Context Management 06:10 – Profiles Explained 08:49 – Model-Based vs Role-Based Profiles 12:58 – Artifacts as a Second Brain 14:32 – Why Alex Switched From OpenClaw 17:32 – Skills, Tools, and Tool Sets 19:19 – Messaging and Cron Setup 21:44 – Reverse Prompting and the Brain Dump 28:09 – Sub-Agents vs Profiles 32:12 – Putting It Together: Solving Challenges 32:38 – The Daily Business Opportunity Scan 37:05 – Local Models: Mac Studio vs DGX Spark 39:03 – Reframing Cost as Investment 41:59 – The Real Way to Make Money With Hermes 42:51 – Closing Thoughts Key Points Hermes Desktop pulls sessions, profiles, artifacts, skills, and cron jobs into one polished, Apple-style interface. Smart session and context management keeps each message slim and keeps monthly costs low. Profiles map to different models — Opus 4.8 for strategy, ChatGPT 5.5 for coding, a local Qwen model for free research — so each task runs on its best fit. Reverse prompting plus a personal brain dump produces far stronger prompts, cron jobs, and outputs. Sub-agents handle one skill across many parallel tasks; profiles handle work where each step needs a distinct skill set. The biggest opportunity: aim your agent at Reddit and X to surface real problems you are positioned to solve. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND ALEX ON SOCIAL Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexFinnOfficial/videos X/Twitter: https://x.com/AlexFinnX Creator Buddy: https://www.creatorbuddy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  Hermes Desktop App just launched, but how do you actually go and make money, be more productive using Hermes Desktop and Hermes Agents in general? So today I have Alex Finn on and he gives you an entire walkthrough of how to use Hermes Desktop App, all the nooks and crannies, explains everything so, so clearly. And then we go through some use cases, so stick, stick around to the end where we show you exactly how you can set up Hermes Agents that go and build businesses for you. This is the most comprehensive tutorial on Hermes Desktop App and Hermes Agents on the internet. And I can't wait for you to actually go learn, build and have some fun. Enjoy the episode.

• 0:52Greg Isenberg?

  Alex Finn, I need you by the end of this episode to explain to me why I need to get Hermes Desktop. I need you to walk me through Hermes Desktop. I need you to show me use cases of Hermes that show me how I can make money, be more productive.

• 1:13Greg Isenberg?

  And I need to, you to explain me why I need to get off OpenClaw, why I need to shut down my Telegram and everything in between. Alex Finn, can you do that by the end of the episode?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Greg Isenberg, mission accepted. We will do that. We will go through why Hermes Desktop is the best AI agent experience on planet Earth. We'll go through every feature, every nuance, every secret. And then we'll show you the sauce. We'll go through all the use cases you can do, every person watching this video. So they can get tremendous amount of value out of Hermes Agent.

• 1:50Greg Isenberg?

  All right, let's go.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  All right, we'll do it. Here we go. I'm gonna share my screen. Great to be speaking with you, Greg. I have been deep into Hermes Agent Desktop the last few days. So they released this a few days ago now. I wasn't expecting it. I believe this is like the moment that Hermes overtook OpenClaw, to be quite honest. And as most people probably know, I was like the OpenClaw guy. I was at a poker tournament last night and a guy was like, "Hey, you're the guy getting paid by OpenClaw, right?" And I'm like, "No, I don't even talk about OpenClaw anymore. What are you talking about?"

• 2:28Speaker 01

  This is Hermes Agent Desktop. So before, everyone was using Hermes and OpenClaw inside Telegram, inside Signal, iMessage, all of that. I think this is the single best way to use Hermes Agent now. I don't use Telegram on desktop anymore. I don't use any other experience. This is clearly the best way to be using Hermes Agent.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  There is a lot here, so a few things. One, sessions, all here, right? So before in Telegram, if you wanted some idea of sessions or multi-threading, you needed to set up threads in Telegram, which is kind of like an advanced confusing thing to do. I know a lot of nerds watching would be like, "What are you talking about? That's easy." For the average person, setting up threads in Telegram isn't the easiest thing to do. You gotta like create separate group chats and then add your bots and then like edit subjects. And here, every time you talk to your Hermes Agent, it just goes into a new session and you can talk to it. So it makes it really nice for like just separating out your context.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  I think the way most people use Hermes Agent by default is they have like kind of like a mono-thread, right? Like just one big thread where they talk about everything in it. The issue is, is you kind of like pollute your context with the 100 different things you talk about. And so your costs skyrocket. Like that's like the number one complaint with Hermes. "Oh my God, I'm paying $1,000 a month." If you manage your context in your sessions well, you are not paying $1,000 a month. You're not paying anything close to it.

• 4:05Greg Isenberg?

  Alex, by the end of this episode, can you show maybe a few ways for us to get our Hermes under control, like some tips and tricks?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely. We'll do that throughout, then we'll recap at the end. I'll give you a whole bunch of sauce on saving money with Hermes as well.

• 4:20Greg Isenberg?

  Okay.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  So, saving money with Hermes, number one, appropriate sessions, context, especially if you're using like Opus, which has a million parameters, context can really inflate your bills, like 3, 4X your bills. So if you keep things individual, right, here's my content session, right, here's my talking about local model session, Mode Research is my stock research session. With the context nice and slim, I'm saving tons of money because every time I send a message, it'll only be that thread itself. For those who are a little less technical, when you send a message to your agent, right, if I were to say, generate

• 5:06Speaker 01

  me an image of a squirrel with Grok Imagine, with this message, it sends everything said before that. So if you have one big thread, like most people interact with Hermes Agent, you're sending massive messages every single time, which will cost you tons of money. But if you take advantage of Hermes Desktop with its multiple sessions and pinning and organization, you can even put sessions in folders. It keeps your context clean, which means your messages are much more slim, which means you save a lot more money on your messages. So, that's one big thing there. The session management on desktop, it's the best, it's

• 5:50Speaker 01

  better than Telegram, it's better than the way 99% of people use Hermes Agent. There's a lot more to it. That's one of my favorites. One of my other favorites is now the organization of profiles. So if you can see down here, it's a little tiny. Maybe I can zoom in a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. You can see a bunch of names down here. We got default, Billy, Coder, GPT Me's, Librarian, Oracle, and Quinn. These are all my different Hermes agents. So for those not as familiar, in Hermes, there is this concept of a profile. You have multiple profiles. Profiles are literally just separate Hermes agents.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Each profile has a, has a set of skills, has a soul dot M V, which is their personality, has sets of memories, has your history of sessions and chats. They're literally just separate agents. And now with desktop, they're organized really, really nicely. So you can just click and it takes you to your other profile. Right? I can just click and it takes me to my GPT Me's, which is my Hermes powered by GPT 5.5. I click on Quinn. This is my Hermes powered by Quinn 37, sitting on my DGX spark on my desk. I click home, that's my default. That takes me to Hermes.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  I named my default Hermes Hermes. I just like that name. And that takes me there powered by Opus 48. Before, like if you wanted to switch profiles, you needed to like go into like your terminal and like do Hermes profile Quinn, enter and like pops open a new. It's like very hard to organize. Now it's very neatly organized here. So I can quickly, okay, I want Quinn, which is my local model to go do this for me. I want GPT Me's, which is my chat GPT model to go and code this for me. Okay, now I'm going to go back and go back in my Opus one and have them do that. And now it's like really easy to multitask. To give some examples of when you'd want to multitask.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  For instance, you know, Opus, very expensive model. I think Opus 48 is the smartest AI model out there. It's also very pricey. So if I'm doing high level thinking and strategy, I'm going to Opus. Then I'll switch to GPT Me's, which is my chat GPT 5.5 model on Hermes. Huge limits on chat GPT, also very good coding. So I'll come in here, I'll be like, hey, build me this app. Quinn, that's my local model, free unlimited intelligence because it's running on my desk. This is for like quick research. Hey, what's the top news in AI? I can have a go and scour the web for the top news and it's not going to cost me a thing,

• 8:44Speaker 01

  completely free. So you got to know which profile is best for which tasks.

• 8:49Greg Isenberg?

  So is the way to think about profiles more around how fast or slow do you want, you know, a task to be completed or how expensive or cheap? Or is the way to think about it similar to how a paperclip works where you're kind of like designing, you know, your product manager, your marketer, your engineer, and you have different profiles for different teammates?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, I, the way I like to think about it is more on the model basis. Each model has its own strengths and weaknesses. So we talked a little bit earlier, Greg, about saving money. Models, if you use them the right way, you'll save tons of money. Coding, I actually think ChatGPT-5.5 is better than Opus 4.8 for coding. And you get way more limits, you get way more usage on your plan. So if I'm going to do coding, I'm going to go to GPTVs, which is my ChatGPT-5.5 profile. If I'm going to do like orchestration, planning, doing in-depth plans, I want to go to my smartest model, which is Hermes powered by Opus 4.8.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  So I'm more along the lines of what are the strengths and weaknesses of each model? I'm going to be honest, I'm not 100% bought into the concept of like having 50 different like product manager, graphic designer.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  I, I think that's a lot of, um, I just think that takes up a lot of context in your, uh, meat brain on like, okay, which one of these 50 profiles do I go to? Do I have a product manager? Do I have a designer? Do I have a writer? I, I, I think that these models are smart enough and generally intelligent enough where you can basically get away with, I can use Opus for designing a graphic image and writing a YouTube script and planning my product. So I'm more think along the lines of what are the strengths of each of the models and, and how can I use them to their strengths to get better performance and save money?

• 11:01Greg Isenberg?

  I like that take. It's basically like, all that matters is the output and the outcomes. Therefore just know which model makes the most sense for what you're trying to get accomplished. And then use the right profile for that.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, uh, I used Paperclip and I think it's a very, very cool, well-designed product. But it's bought into this, the concept that you need to have

• 11:28Speaker 01

  an AI agent in every role. You need to have a senior product manager who manages a design intern, who manages the CTO, who manages like, and the issue is, is that when you think about it in that lens, which you're totally fine to do because that's, it's a more understandable lens for a lot of people. So if it makes more sense to you and you understand your organization better that way, then go ahead and do it. The challenge is I, I think there's inefficiencies there when it comes to cost. Like if I have to go to my CEO and say, hey, build me a, uh, you know, a thumbnail for my latest YouTube video. And then they go to like the product manager who then goes to the graphic designer who then goes to the intern. You have call after call after call, looking at the context

• 12:12Speaker 01

  and the soul and the skills of each one of these. And it's like, I could have just went to Opus for and said, hey, build me a, you know, an image. Like it's, it doesn't have to be that deep. So listen, everyone, you have your own workflows. Do it whatever way you want. I just, for me, I found the most cost savings and efficiency just having it for each model. So those are the profiles. I love going to the profiles. I love being able to go in quickly talk to, okay, I have a quick research task. I'll go to Quinn who's living on my desk, give him a research task, research AI, go to GPT me's, have them go build out an app for me. Profiles, people should be leveraging profiles, setting up profiles for different models. Start saving

• 12:56Speaker 01

  money that way. Get better productivity that way. Lot of other really cool things here. Artifacts. So artifacts basically puts all your images, files and links in one place. And so if you're anything like me, you've been trying to kind of MacGyver your AI agent into like a second brain, which it does really well and it works. It's just kind of a system to maintain. And one of those second brain tasks I have is like, when I'm coming across things, I see inspiration, I see websites that are cool, tools that are cool. I'll take the links and give it to my agent and say, hey, save this link for me. File it away here. Do this for me. Now kind of done automatically

• 13:38Speaker 01

  with artifacts. So you can come in here and see any links you've sent to your agent. You can see any images, media you've created or sent to your agent, any files you've sent back or forth. They're all organized here. And now you can quickly organize them, search through them. So now I don't need to go and be like, hey, file this in my second brain under this category and do this. I just send like a link. I got my librarian. My librarian's just kind of my second brain organization agent. I'll just drop links into my librarian. I don't even tell them to do anything with. I'll just hit send. And now I can go to my artifacts and all my links are just like

• 14:20Speaker 01

  tightly organized here. I can search, I can say Reddit and it shows me all the Reddit ones. So artifacts is sneaky, like a really, really cool place to centralize all your links and images and files and everything.

• 14:33Greg Isenberg?

  That's really cool. They basically, they basically productize the second brain for

• 14:40Greg Isenberg?

  For an agent platform, like they probably saw how people were using it. And they're like, we're just gonna make this really easy, really visual. And that's what I'm liking, by the way, I'm just, I'm seeing this for the first time. That's what I'm liking so far with the whole Hermes desktop experience. It just feels like a more Apple-esque product for the OpenClaw type of experience.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  That's a really good way to put it because, you know, I've switched over from OpenClaw to Hermes. And for the record, neither of these people are paying me. Neither of these people barely even talk to me. I, this is purely for the love of the game.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, one of the-

• 15:25Greg Isenberg?

  Which is a big deal, by the way, you switching from OpenClaw to Hermes, like, where's the breaking tweet, you know what I mean? Like you, you, you, you, like you said, you're an OpenClaw guy, you know? This is a big deal, this is a-

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I was the, I was at the top, you know, not to toot my own horn here, pump my own tires. I was at the top of the game of OpenClaw. This is like Michael Jordan going from basketball to baseball, you know, in 1994. Like that is, this is basically the equivalent of that. And I did it anyway with basically zero fanfare. But I have to, I can't keep pushing things that I don't think are as strong anymore just because I'm getting a bunch of clicks and views, you know?

• 16:05Greg Isenberg?

  Yes.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  You know, it, it, something, I think a subtle shift happened the last couple of months where I think the Hermes team, very much as you just kinda described, went more of the Apple route. Well, I think the OpenClaw team went more of the Android route in a way, where the Hermes updates have been very focused, polished, tested, and tied to really nice narratives that are focused on making life easier for the user. While I feel like the OpenClaw updates have been more kinda shotgun, put everything in it, don't test it quite as well, rough around the edges, doesn't work quite as well.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  We're trying to throw everything in it that will satisfy, you know, the power user. Satisfy, you know, the, the people who do a thousand things at once and like, the updates became very unfocused and worst of all unreliable where I was updating and I'm like, this is hundreds, I'm going to break my open claw and then it did break my open claw. While Hermes is like, their branding is incredible, but like their announcement is like, each update will be like once a week and it'll be like, the efficiency update and everything will be very focused on efficiency and like around that narrative. And as you kind of said, it's like kind of the Apple route where it's just, you know, it doesn't need to be a CLI. It could be a nice desktop experience that's pleasant for the average person to use.

• 17:33Greg Isenberg?

  Can you walk me through the skills and tools section?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of cool things here. This is a nice interface for all the skills that are installed on your Hermes agent. One thing people don't really realize is out of the box, your Hermes agent has like over 150 skills installed. And each one of those actually adds context to your agent. And so that's increasing your cost. Now with this nice user interface, you can come in and you can, turn off any skills that aren't necessary. And you can also see the new skills being generated based on the actions you take.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Not many people realize this. They know Hermes is very self-improving, but they don't realize it's actually creating tons of skills in the background while you're not looking. Right? Like I have a three JS, one file game because I build a bunch of three JS games just for the fun of it. YouTube new scripts, real-time stock dashboard, like there's a lot of skills that get built here. Kind of in the background as you're doing things and you can just turn off, turn on any ones that aren't relevant to you to, to save money and increase efficiency.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Toolsets are groups of tools. So this is a new kind of concept being rolled out right now where, you can group together many skills and tools all in one. So if you're doing something complex, it groups them all together. I gotta play around more with this to be quite honest with you. But toolsets, something definitely more to be used because it's, it's kind of a new concept inside Hermes where you can group together multiple tools and skills.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  That is those, you also have messaging. So again, a lot of really nice things here around just being able to quickly see and visualize the features of Hermes. So if you want to set up more messaging services, you just click it, set it up, right? Before was you had to go into your CLI, Hermes setup, navigate to whatever messaging service. The average person does not want to use a CLI, right? Like I guess, I think there was this huge trend the last few months, CLI is, we're going back to CLI. CLI is the future. Everyone will be working the CLI. That doesn't change the fact, average people do not want to go in the terminal and do anything, right? They don't want to do anything. I get so many complaints in my YouTube videos when I do setup is, where it's like, this is so easy, paste this into your terminal. And I still get

• 20:05Speaker 01

  comments like, I don't want to do that. I have no interest in that. That's not, that's not for me. So this makes it just a lot easier. You never have to go into your terminal again. You never have to go in the CLI. You go in, it gives you like exactly what you need to set up your Telegram, and then it just works. So really easy to set things up here.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  And then one other thing I like is the cron section. So if you click down here on cron, you will see a lot of your cron jobs you have set up. One of the biggest complaints I get when I do these videos is, Alex, you said to do this to set up a routine. I did it, but it didn't work. The next day, the routine didn't happen. The issue is, is when you're using through things through Telegram or the CLI, and you set up these cron jobs, for those who may not be as a technical cron job, just scheduled tasks your computer does, you don't really have any confirmation that they were created. When you ask your agent, hey, every morning 9:00 AM, do this, or every night at 10:00 PM, do this. There's no real way to confirm it actually

• 21:10Speaker 01

  scheduled those things. Now with the cron section, which is at the bottom, one click, you can see all your cron jobs. You can see everything that's scheduled, and you can even create it manually here. So if you want to come in and say, hey, make me a morning brief, tell me about, tell me all the unread emails from the night before, right? You can come in daily, deliver to the desktop, create the cron, you can have 100% confidence this cron job is being created and will happen every day at that time.

• 21:44Greg Isenberg?

  Because cron jobs are and routines are so important to unlocking the value of Hermes, do you have any advice for how do you actually create cron jobs that are worded in a way that actually, you know, have a high likelihood of success?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, whenever it comes to doing things more effectively with AI, or solving for like, kind of unknown unknowns, you know, I know I can be doing this better, but I don't know how to put a better cron job or better prompt in. The answer is always reverse prompting, always. The answer is, I want to, let's do it right now, actually. Let's demo it live. I'm going to do a new session. So say you're a new user Hermes. You want to come in, you want to set up a cron job for every morning, for a morning brief with relevant information in it.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  So you go, I want to set up a morning brief with you for every morning at 9:00 AM. That's usually where people stop. But here's where you take it to the next level with reverse prompting. You go, my interests are generally AI, stock investing, tech, and the Boston Celtics. Right?

• 23:11Greg Isenberg?

  Controversial, controversial.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  The Boston Celtics?

• 23:15Greg Isenberg?

  I would say so, you know? I think a lot of, a lot of the listeners of the podcast are big Knicks fans right now. So, you know, that's what I'm seeing in the, yeah, that's what I'm seeing.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Enjoy a while, last Knicks fans, it's not going to last. Cause Wemby's coming for you. And everyone in the country is rooting for Wemby on this one. Sorry Knicks fans. You got your one year in 30 years, or you have a mild amount of hope. Enjoy it.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  So here's where the reverse prompt comes in, right? I just got, you just lost like 100,000 subscribers by the way. I know. Sorry, Greg. I owe you one.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  What would be the best prompt I can use to set this up with you? So I did a couple of things here. I did a couple of very important things here. Number one, this is my favorite combo in the world, the brain dump to the reverse prompt. You brain dump in everything about yourself, interests, goals, ambitions, skill sets, things like that. So your agent has context around who you are. And then you reverse prompt, based on what you know about me, what's the best way to do this? The issue many people have is they just kind of wing it and tell the agent to do things.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  What they forget is you're talking to like super intelligence, right? You're talking to like the smartest thing on planet earth. So why would you do things your way when you can get help from super intelligence and do it like the best way? So I'm going to head enter on that. And instead of what most people do is, hey, set up a morning brief that tells me the news on AI and the Boston Celtics, and how Jason Tatum is the best player in the NBA. Now it's going to actually tell me the exact prompt to use. So here's the prompt I'd use. And now it gives me this really detailed, in-depth prompt, right? You are compiling Alex's daily morning brief. It's currently early morning Eastern time.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Pull fresh information from the last 24 hours. Do not rely on memory or stale data. Use web search and exact real headlines, prices and scores. Cover these four areas. And then it goes in-depth. AI, the three, four most important developments in AI from the last 24 hours. You know, what this fixes, usually when you say things like, tell me the latest AI news, it'll give you headlines from like two months ago, right? Or it'll even give you headlines from like a year ago because of the model's memory cutoff. But now because of this better prompting, you'll be sure that it's from the last 24 hours. Market and investing. Yesterday's close in pre-market direction for the S and P, Nasdaq and notable movers. Flag one or two stock sectors with unusual news.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Include any major economic events scheduled for today. Like, most people are not going to remember to talk about the Fed CPI earnings or big names. Tech, two to three significant tech industry stories beyond pure AI. Right now, it's like going into extra detail. And what happened now, and here's a big one, formatting. Lead with a one-line vibe summary. Use bold letters and tight bullets. Like, if we use the original prompt most people would use, hey, give me a morning brief of everything about AI. It just would have been like a big dump of text. But now it's nicely formatted, so it's easy to read. And so this is the format I'd go. Brain dump to reverse prompt. You're going to get a lot better prompts, cron jobs and output from your agent.

• 26:47Greg Isenberg?

  Great tip. Thank you.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Of course. What else we got here? So that is the cron jobs. Really, really cool stuff, really amazing to use. You can see your context very easily, your context window very nicely at the bottom now. So you can make sure, oh, you know, our context window is filling up. Let's do slash new to start a new session. And that'll clear that, so you can save money there. You can quickly change your models. This is another really big strength of Hermes. Is they architected their agent away where you can easily, you can switch models much easier than OpenClaw. OpenClaw, like every model is like hardcoded in to OpenClaw. So you have to like, ask them to switch models.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  And when new models come out, you have to wait for OpenClaw to update with that newest model. Hermes, they updated it, they have the agent work in a dynamic way. Where it can just swap in models and thinking settings really, really easily. And the moment a new model drops, you can just swap it in. And so now in here, we're taking the customization step further. You know, oh, I'm going to do a simple task, doesn't require much thinking. Let's use like Opus 48 with minimal effort, or Haiku with minimal effort. Things like that. So another really nice way to save money with your agent. A lot of other really cool things here. There's this agent window when you're go and you're

• 28:14Speaker 01

  multitasking, you've got a bunch of agents doing things, you can see all your subagents spin up. Usually a question I get at this point is, "Subagents, what's there is a subagent in a profile?" So a real Hermes agent. So again, the profiles have their own skills, personality, everything. Subagents are copies of the main agent. So when I go to Hermes and say, "Hey,

• 28:40Speaker 01

  go do research and then build an app based on that research," it'll spin up subagents. Those subagents are just copies of the main agent. So it has the same skills, the same personality, the same everything. But profiles have their own skill sets and context and memories and everything. And so the way you want to think about it is, okay, for what you're doing, does it require a separate set of skills? If it does, then spin up a new profile. Is what I'm doing, can I just use that same set of skills? Just do it multiple times at once? All right, spin up subagents for that. So agents down here is where you can see those subagents work.

• 29:23Greg Isenberg?

  What's a concrete example of that? Like, when would I be in the case where I'd want

• 29:31Greg Isenberg?

  to use multiple subagents? Like, what sort of task?

• 29:35Speaker 01

  So say I am wanting to build out a MicroSaaS. And I want to, it has many different features, maybe five or six different features, maybe it connects to the X API to pull tweets, and then it formats the tweets in a nice way, and then it allows you to share those tweets on Twitter, and then send your own version of that tweet to us. So it's like five or six different features, this MicroSaaS. I would want to use subagents for this. I would go to my Hermes, I'd say, "Build me this MicroSaaS. Here's the 10 different features. Spin up subagents to build out each of those features simultaneously." And then it'll go and spin up, and they all have the same skill set, right, which is just coding. I just need a coding

• 30:20Speaker 01

  agent, but I just need multiple versions of that coding agent. And so it'll spin up five or six subagents to build out that MicroSaaS, because I just, it's doing many things at once. But maybe I wanted to do something like... Okay, I'm working on a YouTube video and I need a script. I need a researcher that will get the information that will feed into that script. I need, you know, a thumbnail, so I need a graphic designer or an agent that is connected to the Grok Imagine API. For that, I would want multiple profiles, right? I'd want, you know, for the researcher, I'm gonna use Quinn, which is my local model.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Say, "Hey, research this script," then hand it off to Hermes, which is my Opus48 model, and have them actually write the script based on your research. And then hand that off to GPT Mees, which is my ChatGPT model, and have them use a ChatGPT image generator to build the thumbnail. That would be a good use case for multiple profiles.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  So the way to think about it, to kind of recap, different skill sets needed, use different profiles. One skill set, but just on multiple strands at once, use subagents.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  With that being said, we talked about sessions, so managing what you're talking about, managing context. We talked about artifacts, organizing all of your files, images, media, all of that. We talked about skills, managing your skills, making sure the right skills are turned off and on. We talked about cron jobs, so the scheduled tasks. We talked about context models. Should we kind of get into the actions, what you can do with all this, putting it all together?

• 32:18Greg Isenberg?

  Yes, please.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  All right, let's do it. I will show you one of my use cases I do. This is real life, have my agent doing this all the time.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  And let me just pull this open over here. I'm going to refresh this. So one thing as a solo entrepreneur, I like to do is I like to solve challenges. Right? You know, that's pretty much the best, most ethical way to make money in this world is find other people's challenges and then solve those challenges. And so with my agents available to me, you've never had more power or leverage to find challenges other people have. And so I have a cron job. Inside my Hermes agent, let's see if I can show to you, is it in this agent here?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Daily AI Business Opportunity Scan. Every 20 minutes, I have my agent going and using the Qwen-3.7 model locally. You don't need a local model for us. You don't need a DGX bar. I'll give you an alternative in a second. But because I have this unlimited free super intelligence on my desk, I have it do it every 20 minutes. I have it go. It's kind of like Idea Browser. These two would fit very well together. Idea Browser and this agent. You put them together, you got magic. But what it does is-

• 33:44Greg Isenberg?

  A lot of people, by the way, a lot of people are using Idea Browser with Hermes, but that's a whole other separate episode I think I can do if people are interested.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  That's an hour episode there. You connect Hermes to Idea Browser and you have it going, just building out each idea.

• 33:59Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Now that's sauce.

• 34:00Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  But what I have it doing is I have Quinn every 20 minutes going and reading Reddit, reading X, searching for other people's challenges. And I'm going to show you what it builds for me here. And I'm going to show you how I take it a step further. Now, if you want to emulate this, you 100% should. You don't need, you don't need to do this every 20 minutes if you're using like a cloud. The, the reason why this works so well with Quinn locally is it's free. So I can have it do it as much as I want. If you're using like chat GPT or Opus, you'd be paying out the wazoo for this because it costs money every time you do something. So maybe you do this just once a morning to save a little cash. But here's the output of that. This cron job.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  I get this custom dashboard it built, which doesn't look like AI slop. Yes, it does, but I don't care. The, the, the styling of it doesn't matter to me. But what I get here is Henry going in, which is actually Quinn 36 on my DGX Spark, does it every 20 minutes? And it finds challenges from people on Reddit and X, gives me the source thread. So I can see what comments, the founder said, the whole agency was basically four APIs in a trench coat. And then because my agent knows so much about me and my skillset, it tells me why I'm in position

• 35:30Speaker 01

  to fix this problem and what should be my first move to solve that challenge. And so now I kind of have this automated business researcher that's going, knows me to a T, knows all my skills, everything, and finds me challenges to solve, right? It knows about my community, so it knows about my assets, what businesses I have, vibe coding Academy. And taking it even a step further, when it finds it appropriate, it even adds this button here. Henry built a, so it automatically built me a prototype for this business idea. And so if I click that, Microsoft prototype built for that idea it had. And so now I can be like, okay, is this interesting? Let me test this.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Oh, actually I think there's something here and then I can productize it and make it shippable. This is kind of how being a solopreneur builder works. You find challenges because you're running efficiently and you're only one person, you don't have much overhead. You can go over these tiny, you can go over these tiny slim markets and make a few bucks off of it. And that's enough to pay the bills, right? And so this is a really nice way I have my agent acting as an employee and finding me opportunities around the clock.

• 36:47Greg Isenberg?

  Side note, so this is really cool. And at the very least, get your creative juices flowing, right? So it might not even be this idea, but you might be like, you know, I'd like this, you know, but if it was in another market, or if it was an app instead of this. But my question to you is, in terms of local models, is your recommendation that people go out and buy, like, what should they be buying, basically? And why should they be buying it?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  My recommendation up to this, or up until recently, was the Mac Studio. The Mac Studio, from a speed and bandwidth perspective, isn't as strong as Nvidia hardware like the Spark and other chips. But you got a lot more unified memory, which allowed you to run much cooler models and much better models, just a little bit slower. The challenge is, is the Mac Studio is pretty much sold out on any, basically every level. You can get it right now, but it's small amounts of memory. It's not like the big, the big boys that allow you to run really good models. So now, I think my recommendation for most people, unless you can find, you know, a

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Mac Studio secondhand or something like that, the DGX Spark's a really great plug and play device. You just, you don't even need a monitor to set it up. Like, you just plug it into the wall and it works. It has 128 gigabytes of unified memory, which basically means you can run any model that goes up to 128 gigs. So Quen, I think 27B works really nicely, any of the new Nematron models. So Nvidia got into the model game recently. Now they're putting out their own open source models. They're building it with the Spark in mind. So I think if you want plug and play, something to run inference for you, so to run your models, the DGX Spark's a great option.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  I prefer the Mac Studio because it's running on the device I have right here and you can use it. It's like a really nice user interface, the macOS. So that's really nice. But the Spark is a, is a good plug and play option if you don't have access to like a really good Mac Studio.

• 39:03Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. And, and just quickly, like, how much is the price on, on that baby?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  They just raised it, I think, to $4,800,

• 39:13Speaker 01

  which seems like a lot, and it is. Everyone's in different financial situations. It for sure is. My kind of thesis, which I think is playing out in front of us right now, is we are going to have hardware bottlenecks for a very long time now because the AI build out's happening. And so memory is skyrocketing. I just bought a memory card for my Nintendo Switch, too. It cost me like $100, like the craziest thing ever. Like, the cost of memory is skyrocketing, all hardware, everything like that. And so hardware is getting more expensive. I think, you know, getting into local models and your own hardware is a very good idea, in my opinion. Playing around with LLMs locally is a very good idea, in my opinion.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Not only for functionality-wise, like what I just showed you here, but also for education and learning-wise. So, you know, I think if you can find the room to afford a DGX Spark, I think it's a really good investment.

• 40:11Greg Isenberg?

  My take is play with Hermes, download the app, show that you can, that you can make this as a part of your daily solopreneur or, you know, just lifestyle. And once you've gotten your hands a little dirty, then you've proven to yourself that if you have the $5,000, that, you know, you deserve it. Like, don't be one of those people that goes and buys the latest and then it sits on a shelf. That's my take.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  You deserve it. That's the takeaway. You deserve it. You owe it to yourself. Get yourself a Spark, man.

• 40:43Greg Isenberg?

  You owe yourself a Spark if you actually go and use this thing, right? Like, and understand how to use it and play with it and actually show, like...

• 40:59Greg Isenberg?

  Show that you can create value for yourself because then at that point you're gonna be like $5,000. Well, if I'm gonna make 10x that, then it's a no brainer, right?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the uh, it's always like the number one question, oh, how much does that cost? What's that? How much is that? I think people have this weird framing around costs when it comes to AI. Like, they see the cost of Claude and they see it's, oh, $200 a month. That's really expensive. It's very, they're comparing it to like the cost of like Netflix and like Xbox Live and Amazon Prime, right? Those things, they just suck your money and life forces away. They're not adding to your life. $200 for Claude, $5,000 for DGX Spark, these are investments in yourself to create more value in the world. And you should, if used the right way, see an ROI. So I would just encourage you to

• 41:55Speaker 01

  think through different lenses when it comes to costs for these different things.

• 42:00Greg Isenberg?

  Alex Finn, before we go, is there one question I should have asked you about Hermes desktop app, Hermes agents in general, that I haven't, that you think that the audience would benefit from me asking? Or did you cover it all?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  I covered it all. I think if you were to ask me a question I'd get more specific on or spend more time on is how the hell do you make money with Hermes? And the answer would be around a lot of what I showed you to the end there, finding challenges, finding opportunities to solve. And I think if your watch is at home, you know, instead of using these agents to kind of play around and experiment with, I think you should be using them to solve other people's challenges because that's how you're gonna be able to create the most value for yourself and the entire world.

• 42:51Greg Isenberg?

  Alex Finn, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for hopping on on short notice, sharing the sauce with us as always. I'll include links for where to find Alex in the show notes, in the description, his X, his YouTube, and everything else in between. Thank you so much. You always hype me up and I love that about you. And

• 43:14Speaker 01

  It's gotta be fun. You gotta have fun doing this.

• 43:16Greg Isenberg?

  100%. It is fun, right? Like, how lucky are we that we can play with these tools that they're coming out so often? I like that you're not afraid to share your opinion in real time as new information comes in. And so I like that about you. And you know, from my perspective, it's like, I like playing with everything and then, and seeing what's best for me. So, thanks again.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Of course. It's a pleasure as always. See you soon, man.

• 43:47Greg Isenberg?

  See ya.