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- [00:00]
A
Hermes Agent. You're seeing it everywhere. People are calling it the Open cloud 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 and 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. 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 going to get?
- [00:56]
B
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.
- [01:10]
A
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 just need you to explain it in the simplest terms, the most clear terms, so that at the end of this episode I can actually go on my computer, get Hermes going. So you're committing to making it as clear as possible and sharing as much sauce as possible.
- [01:34]
B
Exactly, yeah, that's what I'll do.
- [01:37]
A
All right, let's do it.
- [01:38]
B
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. 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 really useless. I felt like I spent more time setting up openclaw than I was actually 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. 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 the 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, over time it gets better. It also uses a typical normal SQLite database, which is the same type of database as normal web applications. 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. I haven't had to restart it in over a week, which is way better than what happened with openclaw. I'll walk you guys through the installation, but before I do, Greg, do you have any questions so far?
- [03:42]
A
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll see by the end of this, but for me it's like, I think a lot of us listening, we might have heard of OpenClaw or might have installed OpenClaw. What I'm begging to know is 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.
- [04:13]
B
No, it 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. 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 and mcp, which is not running right now. So it'll fire up in a second. 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 40 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. 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 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 the skills you need, Hermes is probably the best one for that. What about security?
- [05:54]
A
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?
- [06:04]
B
Yeah, no, that's a really good question. So there's a couple 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 and 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 but isolated from the rest of your files. Then you can also run it on modal as a serverless service as well. 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 every day I'm updating it. And I'm also making sure that I ask it to secure my own setup.
- [07:07]
A
Cool. Let's keep going.
- [07:08]
B
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, select 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 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 a constant battle to figure out exactly which model to use. Oh, wait, I got to run the install again. So one more time. I think I broke it.
- [08:37]
A
Also, with OpenClaw, you can't use Anthropic anymore, right? So with Hermes, can you use an anthropic API key seamlessly?
- [08:51]
B
Correct. Yeah, you can use an Anthropic API key. You also have access to the new router as well. So let me show you. Right, so this is one that's running on my gaming PC. Just I had this as a backup. So if we type. Or let me clear this out so it's easier. Now 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 OpenRouter. So if I go on OpenRouter, you can see I'll be able to see all of the different models. And the cool thing about OpenRouter is that every once in a 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 wanted to run it for completely free, it's available as well. You can see also through OpenRouter, 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 $1.95 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 1/10 the price on the input tokens, which is like really good.
- [10:23]
A
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 you know what your date. Well, I mean, you'll find out basically. Yeah, 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 openclaw instance at this point.
- [10:54]
B
Yeah. So actually 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 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 more deterministic. And that'll actually long term save you tokens because you won't be spending tokens on actually doing the processing every single time. Instead you'll just do it the first time, get it to write the code, and then 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. That's another thing that I notice. I realize that a lot of people are not. If you come from a software engineering world, you're always Kind of thinking in this methodology of don't repeat yourself. So. So if you are in the habit of building reports every single day or you want kind of like a daily digest, a lot of those things can be automated with just pure code instead of relying on an LLM to do like a web scrape or something like that. And that'll also save you a bunch of tokens. So by just switching to Hermes Agent and openrouter, I basically got my token spend down from like, it was like about like $130 every five days down to like maybe like 10 bucks. 10 bucks and every five days. So about like a little bit over a 90% reduction. And I'm still able to do all the things that I want to do. 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 of warmuppets I can go through. 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, you'll see here that there's actually the. 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 15 phone running via Termux.
- [13:26]
A
That's really.
- [13:27]
B
Yeah. And then people are like, 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, I will say that 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 terminal inside of Android, so it'll kind of look exactly like your normal Mac 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. 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 like 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.
- [15:04]
A
A lot of people listen to this podcast, the Startup Ideas podcast, because I don't just bring on people who give practical AI tutorials, but also they like ideas. They like ways to make money using some of these new technologies and stuff like that. With the Android Hermes instance specifically, do you have any ideas that come to mind around. 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?
- [15:40]
B
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 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 super cool, right? So instead of having to literally open up your phone and download a video that's generated and post it, that way 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. That's one way. Another Thing that I've seen is just of course, like, there's like the make money part of it, but also, you know, I have a lot of the very basic parts of my life that are annoying, like already 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 really useless, 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.
- [17:10]
A
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?
- [17:38]
B
Yeah. Like, we can do this. Like, where do I spend the bulk of my time? And let's see if it knows for my memories and if this gets too intimate, we can always cut it out.
- [17:48]
A
That's what we want. Imran. We wanted to get into it.
- [17:50]
B
Yeah. So like, it knows where I live, it knows what time zone I'm in. It's like, okay, where do I spend time? What am I asking questions about?
- [17:58]
A
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?
- [18:10]
B
Yeah. So I think like the idea of using agents to get things done is like a new paradigm. So the easiest way to get used to it is to solve personal problems in your life. So the biggest personal problem that I first solved with an agent was figuring out what to cook at home. Because my wife and I, we love doordashing, we love eating out, but obviously 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 8 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 my fitness goals Are it seems like something small, but it kind of takes a lot of mental load away from my day to day. There's a lot of things. I think that if you start doing really basic stuff like that, you can kind of automate a lot also. We got to cut this out, bro. There's a lot of personal stuff in here. This knows way too much.
- [19:17]
A
Rafa, let's blur it out. We're going to blur it out.
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B
Okay? We have to blur this out. It's a lot.
- [19:24]
A
We're blurring it out, but we're keeping this in the sense that, like, if you do this, it works.
- [19:29]
B
Exactly. Yeah, it does work. It's very intimate. So definitely can't show you guys everything.
- [19:33]
A
Well, it's intimate also because it knows you, right? And you put in the work with it. Right? So if you're starting this from scratch, it won't be intimate, right?
- [19:42]
B
It won't be. Yeah. So like, when you started from scratch, like, you'll have all the tools, you'll have the skills 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, 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, and it'll do that for you.
- [20:04]
A
Okay, what are, what are other must know things about Hermes Agent?
- [20:09]
B
You do still have to update it every night. It's still technically beta software. 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. So you do still have to update it every single day. It is still technically beta software. You still should probably constantly 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.
- [21:06]
A
Before, before we head out, is there a question that I should have asked you about Hermes Agent that I didn't
- [21:12]
B
ask you, should you migrate from opencloth?
- [21:15]
A
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. Let's actually. Would you be open to showing your Muppets?
- [21:30]
B
Yeah, let's show my Muppets. Yeah.
- [21:31]
A
Yeah. 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 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?
- [21:56]
B
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. That'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 sub agents. I have seen people set these up as sub agents. The benefit of that is that you can assign specific models to each one. So I could have a Gmail email triage sub agent that I have assigned a cheaper model to. Right. Because it's more deterministic and it'll tell me, like, if it's like a really simple task, you can assign 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 sub agent. 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 sub agent 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, one setup or two. And the only reason why I say two is if you have one for work and one for personal stuff. Like 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'd still want to have the capabilities of being able to kind of like automate or do work really efficiently.
- [23:41]
A
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.
- [24:06]
B
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 not and kind of hope for the best. The cool thing about Obsidian is that even if you have multiple agents, it's all markdown files. So now this tool that was like, instead of having to know markdown, you can just tell agents to organize them. So I have this kind of setup as just my home MD file. So it tells me all the important things I need to know about this week. It tells me about things I need to get done today, upcoming travel things for my day job, things for, you know, personal stuff. And it's all organized and set up automatically by the agent every day. 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. 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 would. I wouldn't think to use Obsidian in the past, but because I now have agents, I can kind of manipulate it really easily. It just makes it much more fun and easy to use.
- [25:15]
A
Right. So is your recommendation that, you know, once you get Hermes installed, post install, start, you know, using it with Obsidian?
- [25:25]
B
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 solemn D file to specify that it should speak concisely, like, it 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 just feel like the easiest is like the one that you can see on your phone and your computer, you know, and if someone
- [26:00]
A
saw your Obsidian and is like, man, Imran has really, like, that's. That's my dream. How do I. How do they go from, like, how do they make a similar thing? Like, how do you actually do that?
- [26:12]
B
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.
- [26:21]
A
You think it, you think it takes 20 days?
- [26:23]
B
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.
- [26:32]
A
Okay, so maybe it's like seven days. Maybe it's seven days of like using it, you know, consistently. And then after that the Hermes agent knows a good chunk about you. And then you can have it create a similar Obsidian stack.
- [26:51]
B
Right? Yeah. 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.
- [27:17]
A
That's really interesting. Could you like open up? I know this is. We're sort of doing this live, but like, could you open up like a doc and just like write out the prompts that people should be thinking about around 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.
- [27:44]
B
Yeah, a really basic one is like, what have I been procrastinating? Right. That's a good one because it 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 what is the most important thing to work on today? Right. And like, that's like super important. 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? Another one would be, 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, trying to think of another one. Is there anything important today that I missed? Right.
- [28:47]
A
Anything around cron jobs? MD files?
- [28:53]
B
I'm trying to think. Yeah, I think, 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. I want to show you. There was a psychiatrist that made a computer or made like a computer program. Yes. His name is Joseph Weizenbaum and he made a natural language processing computer program over the course of three years at mit. That's basically like a chatbot therapist. And I've actually loaded this up as a skill inside of Hermes where I can talk to it every single day. And it will basically help me self actualize about what I should also work on. So there's a lot of these weird little niche, like personal development things 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 psychiatrist thing. But like you can just drop this Wikipedia file inside of your Ms. Agent and say like, you'll turn this into a skill and it'll do it.
- [30:35]
A
That's really cool.
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B
Yeah.
- [30:40]
A
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 just how you work today in the Ajai.
- [31:11]
B
Yeah, exactly. The biggest thing is learning how to use Hermes Agent is not actually the skill, it's going to become the requirement.
- [31:18]
A
Exactly.
- [31:19]
B
Yeah. And whether it's like Hermes today, maybe Open Cloud gets better, maybe Claude Cowork, maybe it's Nebula. Whatever it is, you still need to know what to do with it. And that's kind of where it counts.
- [31:30]
A
Last question around skills. I know that you showed some pre built Hermes skills. You know what are, what are some, you know, must install skills that you recommend for people listening?
- [31:49]
B
Yeah, so I definitely recommend installing the Obsidian skill. 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 your context as small as possible. Another really useful one, let me see from my ghosty. 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 Skill to use GStack. And yeah, I think those are the
- [33:04]
A
big ones just because I think some people don't know what Gstack is. Can you just give a quick primer on what Gstack is and why you think that people should install GStack with Hermes?
- [33:17]
B
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 onto your agent. And that's something that like, was never available before in the past. 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.
- [34:13]
A
And it's a no brainer. It's free.
- [34:14]
B
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 90s tuner car culture. Right. Like you can go find the parts you want and you could put them on and you should like learn how to customize it for yourself. As long as you remember that customizing it is not the skill, but it's more about what you get done with it.
- [34:34]
A
Right. I think it's like you do have to remind yourself that 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. So it's, it's like don't be an artist about it. Right. Like at the end of the day you want something that's gonna add value to your own personal life, that's gonna add value to your business life and it's a rabbit hole basically. And to go down and where you're like optimizing and optimizing and optimizing, but don't do it.
- [35:18]
B
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. Just makes me better at my job.
- [35:49]
A
It's a big deal, right? That's the way I see it is if you value your time at say $500 an hour in terms of the opportunities that could come, that's a huge deal. Imran, thank you so much for giving us 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 think that you're super talented at explaining technical concepts in a really simple way. So I would love to have you back on the show, but people let me know, let me know in the comments. Did you feel it? I think he brought this off. So thanks again, Imran. Is there anything you want to leave people with?
- [36:43]
B
Yeah, I work at a fund. It's called Alif. Check us out. Alif Build A L I F dot B U I L D. And of course I'm on social media. Imranye. I think after this I'm just going to make more videos.
- [36:55]
A
So let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. All right, Thanks a lot.
- [36:59]
B
All right, thanks for having me, man.