Hermes Agent clearly explained (and how to use it)

I sit down with Imran Muthuvappa to get a hands-on walkthrough of Hermes Agent, a personal AI agent that ships with built-in memory, 40+ tools, and pre-installed skills out of the box. Imran walks me through why he migrated from OpenClaw, how to install Hermes on a Mac or even an Android phone via Termux, and how he cut his token spend by roughly 90% using OpenRouter. We get into agent design (one agent vs. multiple), connecting Hermes to Telegram and Obsidian, and the kinds of prompts that turn a personal agent into a daily operating system. By the end, I have a practical roadmap to install Hermes, pick a model, and start automating real parts of my life and business Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 01:38 – Why Imran Left OpenClaw (Memory, Gateway, Tokens) 04:26 – Hermes Setup Tour and 40+ Built-In Tools 07:06 – Installing Hermes on Mac, Linux, and WSL 12:21 – Telegram and Android Agents 17:09 – Auditing Your Life With Your Agent 20:04 – Must-Know Hermes Tips: Updates, Tailscale, Telegram 21:07 – Should You Migrate From OpenClaw? 25:58 – Hermes + Obsidian as a Daily Dashboard 27:16 – Must-Use Prompts for a Personal Agent 31:29 – Must-Install Skills: Obsidian, Honcho Memory, G-Stack 33:04 – What G-Stack Is and Why It Matters 34:18 – Customization Is a Trap; Output Is the Skill 35:19 – Closing Thoughts Key Points Hermes Agent solves OpenClaw's three biggest pain points: built-in memory (writes to SQLite on successful tasks), gateway stability, and token visibility. Installation is a single command on Mac, Linux, or WSL, and Hermes ships with 40+ tools and popular skills (Apple Notes, Reminders, iMessage, Find My) pre-installed. Switching to Hermes with OpenRouter can cut token spend by roughly 90%, from about $130 per five days to around $10 per five days in Imran's case. You can run Hermes on a cheap Android phone via Termux + Termux API, unlocking SMS, sensors, and on-device social posting as a cheap alternative to a Mac Mini. The real skill is defaulting to your agent for work, then meta-prompting it nightly: "What am I procrastinating? What should I automate? What tool can you build me tonight?" Imran recommends pairing Hermes with Obsidian for a clean daily dashboard and installing G-Stack (a Y Combinator-style startup skill from Gary Tan) if you are building a product. 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 IMRAN ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/imranye Alif: https://alif.build

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

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  Hermes Agent, you're seeing it everywhere. People are calling it the OpenClaw killer. And today's episode is about how you can actually install it, how you can connect it with GStack by Gary Tan, how you can connect it to Obsidian, how you can create skills. We go through step by step how you can get started with Hermes Agent. This is everything you need to know for how to run it, get started, and actually how you can even use it on an Android device. So enjoy the episode. It's with my dear friend Imran, who just explains technical concepts in such a, such a clear way. It's a breath of fresh air. Enjoy the episode, the introduction to Hermes Agents.

• 0:46Greg Isenberg?

  I begged them to come on and Imran has come on. Thank you for, for, for coming on. By the end of this episode, Imran, what are people gonna get?

• 0:56Speaker 01

  By the end of this episode, you'll learn how to install Hermes Agent, which is the best personal agent. It has built in memory. It learns about your workflows and helps save you time, money, and allows you to do more. And I'll even show you how to install it on an Android phone.

• 1:10Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, cool. Yeah, so been hearing a lot about Hermes. Obviously it's going viral. Is it the new OpenClaw? I don't know. Imran, I, I just need you to explain it in the simplest terms, the most clear terms, so that after, at the end of this episode, I can actually go on my computer, get Hermes going. So you're committing to, to making it as clear as possible and, and sharing as much sauce as possible?

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah, that's what I'll do.

• 1:36Greg Isenberg?

  All right, let's do it.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  All right, so the first thing, the way that I found Hermes Agent was that I tried using OpenClaw. And when I was using OpenClaw, I ran into basically three massive issues. The first issue is that I kept having to tell it to do the same things over and over again, because there was no built in memory system, right? And this is a common problem. The second problem I found was that I had to keep restarting the gateway. I think there was a day where I had to restart the gateway once an hour. And so that was like really useless. I felt like I spent more time setting up OpenClaw than I was actually like using it to make my life better. And the third big problem with OpenClaw for me was just that it was eating up tokens and I had no visibility into how or why.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  So I quickly migrated over to Nebula, which is if you're looking to build, if you're looking to kind of have just like an AI coworker, Nebula is probably the better tool. But if you want to have like personalized workflows, if you want to kind of tinker under their hood, and you want to have a system that learns over time, I highly suggest using Hermes. So the three things that Hermes does better than OpenClaw are basically solving the three problems that I mentioned. One is that it has a built-in memory system. So every time you complete a task and successfully complete it, it automatically writes to its own memory. This way, like over time, it gets better. It also uses a typical like normal SQLite database, which is the same type of database as, you know, normal web applications.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And what that allows it to do is search in real time for times where it's done something successfully for you. So if it didn't save it to its memory, it can actually go and search through all of the logs of all the things you've asked it to do and remember it. Even things like API keys, if you forget to save them to an environment variable, but you kind of passed it to the agent, it can actually search through and find it for you. And the last thing is, it's just more stable. Like I haven't had to restart it in like over a week, which is way better than what happened with OpenClaw. So I'll walk you guys through the installation, but before I do, Greg, do you have any questions so far?

• 3:41Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll see by the end of this, but you know, for me, it's like, I think a lot of us listening, like we might have heard of OpenClaw, might have start, you know, installed OpenClaw.

• 3:54Greg Isenberg?

  You know, 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 OpenClaw, basically. You know what I mean? Like, I just kind of want to pick an ecosystem and be like, this is my personal agent.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  No, makes a lot of sense. 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.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  So 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, it's going to try to open up my Xcode MCP, which is not running right now, so it'll, it'll fire up in a second.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Cool. Yeah, and I'll zoom out a little bit. You can see here, when you open up Hermes for the first time, on the top, you'll see the available tools. So Hermes comes built in with forty plus built in tools that Open Cloud 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, 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.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  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-installed as well. So like I'm on a MacBook, so it has all of like the Apple Notes, Apple Reminders, it's got Find My, it's got iMessage. I did not have to go and find this from a Skills Hub. It was already ready to go as soon as I installed it. So if you want to talk about simplicity of installation and having all those skills you need, Hermes is probably the best one for that.

• 5:53Greg Isenberg?

  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?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's a really good question. 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 meta prompting it. So Hermes has knowledge of where the keys are stored in your configuration. And you can say like, is this a secure 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. 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,

• 6:43Speaker 01

  but isolated from the rest of your files. And then you can also run it on Modal as like a serverless service as well. So it's really flexible in how you run it. I personally am a little bit risky and I just kind of run it on the bare metal. 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.

• 7:06Greg Isenberg?

  Cool, let's, let's keep going.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  All right, so the installation, if you're on a Mac, is pretty straightforward. You can just head over to the Hermes agent documentation. It's on the new research website. And if you're on Linux, macOS, or even Windows Subsystem for Linux, it's just this one line command. If it's your first time installing a tool like this on a Mac, you'll probably need to install the Xcode Developer Tools. So I covered that in the video that Greg found me through. But basically, you would do like xcode dash select dash dash install. You can see this command right here, and I will actually run it here. I already have it installed, you can see. And if you need to update it, you can update it later. So yeah, you can just go ahead and copy this command

• 7:52Speaker 01

  and paste it in, and it'll run. Now, obviously, I have it installed as already, so it'll just go through the update. Another thing that I found was that you can actually skip the, you can skip the onboarding, and you can just close out of it. And the most important commands that you'll need to know once you have it installed is just this one right here, which is Hermes model. So this kind of brings me into the next, the next problem that I had with OpenClaw, which was that with OpenClaw, I just did not have enough visibility into how much I was spending on tokens. And it was like, it was like a constant battle to figure out like exactly which model to use. Oh, I gotta run the install again. Throw it one more time. Think I broke it.

• 8:36Greg Isenberg?

  Also, with OpenClaw, you can't use Anthropic anymore, right? So with Hermes, can you use an Anthropic API key seamlessly?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Correct, yeah, you can use, you can use an Anthropic API key. You also have access to the new router as well. So let me show you. All right, so this is a, this is one that's running on my gaming PC. Just I have this as a backup. So if we type, or let me clear this out, so it's easier, then I'll type. Hermes model. And here you can see, these are all the different providers that you can use to select a model. Again, this is already out, like this is all like out of the box. I did not have to go install anything. And the two biggest ways to save money on this is really just to use either the new portal or open router. So if I go on open router, you can see, I'll be able to see all of the different models. And the cool thing about open router is that every once in a

• 9:36Speaker 01

  while, you'll have some free models available. So here Nvidia's Nemo Tron is free this week. So if you wanted to use that model and you just want to run it for completely free, it's available as well. You can see also through open router, I'm able to access anthropics models here. Remember you were asking. So they're both available. And you can see a very clear layout of exactly how much it'll cost. So you know, if I, if I want to use Quinn 3.6 plus, it's probably only going to cost me 33 cents per million tokens for input and about a dollar 95 per million tokens of output. And you can see the price difference between Sonnet and Quinn, right? So you could, it's like, almost like one tenth the price on the input tokens, which is like

• 10:21Speaker 01

  really good.

• 10:23Greg Isenberg?

  And you sort of know in sense, like you know how much you're going to spend on tokens, you don't really know. Once you have it set up, like how mu, you know, what your day, well, I mean, you'll find out basically.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:35Greg Isenberg?

  The, the, the task you give it, how much things are going to cost. And, and I think that, that's sort of the issue I think some people are having is like, they're spending, I mean, it's not crazy to spend hundreds of dollars a day on your open claw instance at this point.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So actually, the, one of the interesting ways to fix that, using the Hermes agent, is that you can actually, once you have a task that you know that you want to run like on a recurring basis, you can actually have it write the code one time for it. So instead of requiring an agent in the loop every single time that you need to do something, you can actually write the code to make it like more deterministic. And that'll actually long term, save you tokens, because you won't be spending tokens on actually, like doing the processing every single time. Like instead, you'll just do it the first time, get it to write the code. And then, you know, if you're using a free model, you can use the free model to write the code, and then you basically will spend no tokens on that singular skill or task forever.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  That's like another thing that I noticed. I I realized that a lot of people are not. If if you come from a software engineering world, you're always kind of thinking in this methodology of like, don't repeat yourself. So like, if you are like in the habit of like building reports every single day, or you want like a kind of like a daily digest. A lot of those things can be automated with just pure code instead of relying on an L L M to do like a web scrape or something like that. And that will also save you a bunch of tokens. So by just switching to Hermes Agent and Open Router, I basically got my token spend down from like, it was like about like a hundred and thirty dollars every five days. Down to like maybe like ten bucks, ten bucks every five days. So about like a little bit over a ninety percent reduction. And I'm still able to do all the things that I want to do.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Uh, the other important thing that I think everyone will want to know is that, of course, Hermes Agent does allow you to have a connection to Telegram. So you can see all my agents here are named after the Muppets. So I still have a lot of room for expansion. If I need to add more agents, there's still a bunch more Muppets I can go through. Um, and I can talk to them in Telegram, just like how I can talk to them inside of the terminal. And this Cookie Monster one is super special because if you kind of take a sneak peek at the screen here, this one is actually running on a Solana Seeker Android phone that I have right here. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that because I got this set up finally yesterday. If you want to set up Hermes Agent on an Android phone,

• 13:06Speaker 01

  you'll see here that there's actually, uh, the same way that you install it on your computer. There is a script that you can install to put it on an Android phone. And so here I have installed it on the Android phone. And you can see what device am I on? And it says here I'm on a Seeker Android fifteen phone running via Termux. So, yeah, so and then people are like, i- if some of the people who saw that I was doing this on Twitter were asking like, oh, like, why would I install it on an Android phone instead of installing it on a computer? So before I get into that, uh, I will say that the there are a few extra steps for installing it on Android. The first thing is that you need an app called Termux. Termux is basically like a a terminal inside of Android.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  So it'll kind of look exactly like your normal Mac term- terminal. And then if you want to extend it even further, there's another app called the Termux API. And the Termux API app, it's available on the F Droid, which is an open source Android App Store. But the Termux API actually gives you access to the sensor data on your phone. So you can access information about the battery, you can change the Wi-Fi network, you can change the volume of the device. You can take photos using the Android phone, you can adjust the brightness, you can trigger the vibration motor. There's like all, basically everything that the Android phone has access to, you now have access to.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  So you can imagine a world where instead of having this running on a Mac Mini, which is like sold out, you can have it running on an Android phone that's, you know, Android phones are very cheap. And you can put a SIM card inside of it, you can bring it with you, you can have it read your text messages that are sent directly to that number. You can automate basically two factor authentication that comes in via SMS. And basically like you now have a version of like an always on low power dedicated agent device that isn't a Mac Mini and that isn't as expensive.

• 15:04Greg Isenberg?

  A lot of people listen to this podcast, the Startup Ideas podcast, because, you know, I don't just bring on people who, you know, give practical AI tutorials, but also they like ideas, they like ways to make money using some of these, you know, new technologies and stuff like that. You know, with the Android Hermes instance specifically, like, can, do you have any ideas that come to mind around like, okay, you know, if I were trying to make money with Hermes agent on Android, you know, what are, what are the, some things that come to mind, top of mind?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first thing is probably because you have access to the Termux API, you can actually fire off commands on the Android phone itself, like you can tap the screen. And you can like send notifications. So if, I think one of the next things I want to set up is of course, like everyone, some sort of like social media automation that uses the phone directly. So right now we have a lot of scheduler tools and people complain that social media scheduling tools, they nerf your reach because, you know, like they're going through the API instead of on the device. Well, this kind of solves that because you can actually post the content directly from the device. That's one thing that's like super cool, right? Instead of having to, you know, literally like open up your phone and download a video that's generated and post it that way.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Uh, you could have this technically running on an almost infinitely scalable amount of Android phones and run accounts and post from there. And it will still show that it came from a device with like a real Mac address. Um, that's one way. Um, another thing that I've seen is just, of course, like, there's like the make money part of it. Um, but also, you know, I have a lot of the very basic parts of my life that are annoying, like R D automated. So like I have an email triaging agent that every morning goes through my emails, deletes the ones that are like unnecessary, unsubscribes from things that I subscribe to that are like, uh, really useless. Um, and then shows me a digest of the important emails. That might not directly make me more money right now, but it's still saving me about like 30 minutes to an hour a day and just allowing me to do more.

• 17:09Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. Yeah. I think the hard part is just figuring out like taking stock auditing your, your personal life to be like, what are the things I need automated? And then also from a business perspective, what are the things I need to be automated? I think that's part of the hard part. And I guess like, you know, you could, you can ask Hermes agent to audit your life, right? And start asking you questions to help you, like ask it to help you, you know?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, like we can do this. Like, where do I spend the bulk of my time? And let's see if it knows from my memories. And if this gets too intimate, we can always cut it out.

• 17:47Greg Isenberg?

  That's what we want, Aaron. We wanted to get into it.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like it knows where I live and knows what times that I'm in. It's like, okay, where do I spend time? What am I asking questions about?

• 17:58Greg Isenberg?

  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?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  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 doordashing, 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 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?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  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 got, we got to cut this out, bro. There's a lot of personal stuff in here.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  There's no way too much.

• 19:16Greg Isenberg?

  Bravo, let's blur it out. We're gonna blur it out.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Okay, we have to blur this out. It's a lot, bro.

• 19:23Greg Isenberg?

  We're blurring it up, but we're keeping this in the sense like if you do this, it works.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. It does work. It's very intimate. So definitely can't show you guys everything.

• 19:33Greg Isenberg?

  Well, it's intimate also because it knows you, right? And you've you put in the work with it, right? So if you're starting this from scratch, it won't be intimate, right?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  It won't be. Yeah. So like when you start it from scratch, like you'll have all the tools, you'll have the skills. Um, as you talk to it every single day and you use it for work over and over again, it'll, like I said, it'll store in its memory, it'll begin to learn exactly what you do, what like um, and how it can help you. And you can even ask it like every night, you can ask it like what's one or two things that you can build for me that would make my life better. Um, and it'll do that for you.

• 20:04Greg Isenberg?

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

• 20:08Speaker 01

  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 five hundred and thirty five commits behind, which is quite a bit.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  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. 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. Another thing that I highly recommend for any of these tools is that you install Tailscale and you configure Tailscale correctly. So Tailscale will allow your phone and all of your computers to be on the same kind of virtual network. 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.

• 21:06Greg Isenberg?

  Before, before we head out, is there a question that I should have asked you about Hermes agent that I didn't ask you?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Should you migrate from OpenClaw?

• 21:15Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, I've got my, yeah, I mean, that's the big question, right? Should you, now that we've seen it, I mean, well, we've, we've sort of, you know, I should have, I, let's actually, would you be open to showing your Muppets?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's show them off, yeah.

• 21:32Greg Isenberg?

  And, and also, like, with respect to your Muppets, like, does it make sense to set up, you know, one agent, multiple agents? Like, how, how do people think about designing their, their agents? You know, like, do I create one that's called like, social media manager? And it's just doing social media stuff? Or how should I think about this?

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is something that's still kind of a work in progress for me as well. So you can see, Count is, is, is my main kind of agent. It's the one that's running on my gaming computer. And you can see this has all of like my personal stuff set up. So I have cron jobs for like doing my Gmail triage, for unsubscribing to emails, to give me like expense reports, like some more personal stuff, like finance stuff is all set up here. These are technically cron jobs. They're not subagents. I have seen people set these up as subagents. The benefit of that is that you can assign specific models to each one. So I could have a Gmail email triage. Subagent that I have assigned a cheaper model to, right?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Because it's more deterministic and it'll tell me like if if it's like a really simple task, you can assign a like a a cheaper model to it and kind of save money that way. And you can add like more specific instructions. But I've also seen people just set it up as a cron job. So I have it set up as a cron job. I don't have it set up as a subagent. So I think a lot of these kind of specifics are still being figured out. We don't really know if it's better to have it as a subagent or not. The thing that is that we can agree on is that having an agent that has memory and learns over time is incredibly powerful. And I have four set up here just because I'm like a tinkerer. But I actually think the most optimal way to do it is to have one setup or two.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  And the only reason why I say two is if you have one for work and one for personal stuff, like I I imagine if I worked at like a Fortune 500 company, they wouldn't let me like run Hermes agent with all my personal stuff on it on my work computer. But I still want to have the capabilities of being able to kind of like automate or do work really efficiently.

• 23:40Greg Isenberg?

  Mm hmm. It's also, it feels cleaner a little bit if it's personal and work. Like my to do list, for example, I have like the way I run my life, you know, I use things, the to do to do app, and I just have personal and and work. And like to me, that just like makes the most sense. So like when I, the way I'm going to set this up after this call is I'm going to set up a personal one. I'm going to set up a work one.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think another thing that maybe we didn't cover that I think we talked about a little bit on Twitter is that this is like Obsidian. So I was never a big Obsidian fan. I kind of just stored everything in my Apple Notes and kind of hope for the best. The cool thing about Obsidian is that even if you have like multiple agents, it's all like markdown files. So now this this tool that was like, instead of having to know markdown, you can just tell agents to like organize them. So I have this kind of setup is just like my home M D files. So it tells me all the important things I need to know about this week. It tells me about like things I need to get done today, upcoming travel, things for like my day job, things for like, you know, personal stuff. And it's all organized and set up automatically by the agent every day.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  And so I would not have been able to go through like the painstaking effort of like putting this together by myself every single morning.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  But now like I have an agent that does it for me. And it's just so much easier. But this is like not something I would have done before. Like I wouldn't, I wouldn't think to use Obsidian in the past, but because I now have agents that can kind of manipulate it really easily. It just makes it much more fun and easy to use.

• 25:14Greg Isenberg?

  Right. So you're right. Is your recommendation that, you know, once you get Hermes installed, post install, start, you know, using it with Obsidian?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  I think Obsidian is a really clean layout, because if you look at like, if you look at Telegram, like some of these just kind of read as like massive walls of text. And even if I, even if I like organize it, or even if I put something in like my soul 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. But I, I just feel like the easiest is like the one that you can see on your phone and your computer, you know?

• 25:58Greg Isenberg?

  And if someone saw your Obsidian and is like, man, Imran has really like, that's, that's my dream. How do, how do they go from, like, how do they make a similar thing? Like, how, how do you actually do that?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my Obsidian was set up by my Hermes agent after using my Hermes agents for like 20 days. So as it learned about me, yeah.

• 26:21Greg Isenberg?

  You think, you think it takes 20 days?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  No, I, I think, I think it takes, I think it takes building up the habit of using of default, going to the agent to get work done, even if you can do it yourself. That's the biggest thing.

• 26:32Greg Isenberg?

  Okay. So maybe it's like seven days, maybe it's seven days of like using it, you know, consistently. And then after that, their Hermes agent knows a, you know, good chunk about you. And then you can have it create a similar Obsidian stack, right?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and you still, right now, you still kind of have to meta prompt it. So you can ask it at the end of every day, like, what is something you should build for the work I do? Or what is one way that you can, what is like one, one task I'm doing over and over again that I should set up as a cron job? And it'll know, but you still kind of have to prompt it, right? So I'm hoping in the future that you don't have to do that, that it just kind of knows automatically. But we'll get there. We're pretty close.

• 27:16Greg Isenberg?

  That's really interesting. Could you like open up, I know this is where we're starting doing this live, but like, could you open up like a doc? Just so, and, and just like write out like the, the prompts that people. Should should be thinking about around around for for Hermes agent like what are the ones that you're using Imran that you're like, it seems obvious to you, but you know, people might, you know, not know.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, a really basic one is like, what have I been procrastinating? Right? That's a good one because he has access to your to do list. If you're listening to this podcast, like you're probably doing a lot and there's probably something that's like, you know, under the hood that like, you just haven't gotten to yet. Another one is, um, what is the most important thing to work on today? Right? And like, that's like super important. Um, another one would be like, like I mentioned, like, what are some tasks that I'm doing every single day that I could or should automate?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Another one would be,

• 28:23Speaker 01

  what is a tool that you can build me tonight that would make my life easier tomorrow? Right? Like these types of things like where you're, yeah, this you're right. This does kind of seem obvious to me. But to many people like it's kind of a new, new way of thinking.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Trying to think of another one.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Is there anything important today that I missed? Right?

• 28:47Greg Isenberg?

  Anything around cron jobs, MD files?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  I'm trying to think. Yeah, I think, uh, I think, I think the cron job setup could be is like a little bit difficult in the beginning because I feel that people don't understand like what a cron job is. It's still a very technical term, but it's essentially just something that runs on a schedule. And you like everyone does, everyone has a list of tasks or a list of things that they do every single day that probably could or should be automated, right? And so asking it to set up cron jobs for those things will just kind of make your life a little bit easier. The last thing I did want to show you now that I'm thinking about it is I actually have, um, I want to show you. There was a psychiatrist.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  That made a computer or made like a computer program. Uh, yes, his name is Joseph Weizenbaum, and he made a natural language processing computer program. Um, over the course of three years at MIT, that's basically like, uh, like a chatbot therapist. Um, and I've actually loaded this up as a skill inside of Hermes where I can like talk to it every single day and like help it. It it will basically help me self actualize about what I should also work on. Um, so there's a lot of these like weird, like little like niche, like personal development things. Um, that you can actually build really easily, right? It took them three years to build out this like natural language processing, like kind of like.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Um, psychiatrist thing, but like you can just drop this Wikipedia file. Inside of your Hermes agent and say like, you'll turn this into a skill and it'll do it.

• 30:34Greg Isenberg?

  That's really cool.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:39Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, that's sort of the daunting part about, you know, be it OpenClaw or Hermes is like. You sort of need the ideas around, like I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't have come across that. You know, Wikipedia article and been like, oh, I should make this a skill, right? So. The prompting yourself to actually. Think about like, oh, I'm navigating the internet or I'm navigating the world. How can I make this a skill? So that I can use this every day just has to be a part of your, it's it's just how you work today in the age AI.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. The biggest thing is like learning how to use Hermes agent is not actually the skill. It's gonna become the requirement, you know?

• 31:18Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And whether it's like Hermes today, maybe OpenClaw gets better, maybe Claude Co-Work, maybe it's Nebula, whatever it is like. You still need to know what to do with it. And that's like, kind of where where it counts.

• 31:30Greg Isenberg?

  Last question around skills. I know that you showed.

• 31:35Greg Isenberg?

  Some pre-built Hermes skills.

• 31:40Greg Isenberg?

  You know, what are, what are some, you know, must install skills that you recommend for people listening?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I definitely recommend installing the Obsidian skill.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  I actually don't even use the Obsidian CLI, but I use the Obsidian skill. That one's really important. I've seen some people install the Honcho Dev Memory skill. I haven't needed to set that up yet, though I think I probably will because there are some memory limits on Hermes and you kind of want to keep like your context as small as possible. Another really useful one, let me see from my coasty.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Well, so a lot of these skills I've built myself, right? Like I have like a bank statement analysis one. So I definitely think like, whatever you do, you should always like start with like, try to build out your own skills around like personal finance and like fitness and like all the things that you already pay for. And maybe those aren't ones that you actually go download, but they're ones that you build. Another really interesting one that I think everyone should play around with are of course all of the software development related skills. I even, you can see here, I actually ported over Gstack by Gary Tan into Hermes before it was widely available on Hermes. So I definitely, you know, if you're working on a startup, it's definitely like a really cool, cool skill to use Gstack.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  And yeah, like I think those are the big ones.

• 33:04Greg Isenberg?

  Just because I think some people don't know what Gstack is, can you just give a quick primer on what Gstack is? And you know, how, why you think that people should install Gstack with Hermes?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So Gstack is basically, the way I understand it, is it was built for Claude Code and it was made by Gary Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator. 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 and make decisions on that. So 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. But now a lot of that knowledge has been basically open sourced as a skill that you can bolt on to your agent. And that's something that like was never available before in the past.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  So if you're obviously working on a startup like an app or something. 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.

• 34:12Greg Isenberg?

  And it's a no brainer. It's free.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  It's free. Yeah, yeah. It's like the the agent itself is like it's like Hermes agent is like basically like. It's like nineties tuner car culture, right? Like you can go find the parts you want and you can put them on and you should like learn how to customize it for yourself. As long as you remember that like customizing it is not the skill, but it's more about what you get done with it.

• 34:33Greg Isenberg?

  Right. And I think it's like. You do have to remind yourself that.

• 34:40Greg Isenberg?

  I like how you said that customizing is not the skill and there's so many people who are just obsessed with the customization and then. They're not actually doing anything, right? Like, so it's it's like. Don't be an artist about it, right? Like.

• 34:57Greg Isenberg?

  At the end of the day, you want something that's going to add value to your own personal life that's going to add value to your business life and. And it's it's a rabbit hole, basically, and. To to go down and where you're like optimizing and optimizing and optimizing, but. Don't do it.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, this handles the optimization for you. Like the biggest thing when people say like. A lot of people have asked me like, what's been the most useful thing about like Hermes agent? Like day to day, I work at a fund and I'm able to talk to more founders and have better conversations with them. Because a lot of the background work is now handled by my personal agent. That's awesome. That's a huge win for me. If we can talk to 20% more companies or 30% more companies. We have better signal, we get better deal flow, we're helping out more founders, we're eventually going to return more as a fund. Right? It just makes me better at my job.

• 35:49Greg Isenberg?

  It's a big deal, right?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:50Greg Isenberg?

  That's the way I see it is like if you value your time at say $500 an hour in terms of the opportunities that could come, that's a huge, that's a huge deal. So, Imran, thank you so much for giving us, you know, the go to guide for installing Hermes Agent, playing with Hermes Agent, making skills, installing it with GStack and Obsidian. I really appreciate it. I'll include links for where you can follow Imran on the internet, which is where I found him. And I, I think that you're super talented at explaining technical concepts in a really simple way.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 36:28Greg Isenberg?

  So I would love to have you back on the show. But people, let us, let me know, let me know in the comments, you know, is this, did you, did you feel it? I think he brought this off. So thanks again, Imran. Is there anything you want to leave people with?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I work at a fund. It's called ALIF. Check us out, alif.build, A-L-I-F.B-U-I-L-D. And of course, I'm on social media at Imran Y. I think after this, I'm just gonna make more videos. So let's do it.

• 36:55Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Let's do it. All right. Thanks a lot.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks for having me.