The New Ai Adventure

So haven’t added a post on here for a while but thought as a way to update the general html on the site I might as well add a post about my random AI adventures. I am not saying that I am some AI Guru in fact ive been somewhat green about the idea of AI in my life, though I use it from time to time on messenger and other websites (mostly to create minion images of hate crimes, you would be surprised what you can do when you say “a minion”) But I’ve always wanted to do more, and also wanted to self host the experience.

I have since discovered that all the things required to do this in house have increased by about 800% in price for some reason (no idea what would have caused that) and then decided to go down the API route. I was curious on openclaw and decided to do a bit of research and ended up avoiding it all together, this is when I discovered Hermes.

Now I had a couple of things that needed to be a must when I was looking at anything to do with AI Agents.

• It needed to be self hosted
• I needed to have somewhat moderate idea of what the hell the Agent is doing in a general sense
• I would prefer that anything that is sent to a AI service provider wasn’t ingesting and learning from my prompts.

So when I first initially set this up, I setup Hermes on my own hardware and decided to throw $12 at OpenAI to see what this thing could do. Honestly I was quite impressed, I gave the agent some questions about what I wanted it to do, if it could interact with some simple things (A caldav server and email) and it created skills for these in a matter of minutes.

Then it stopped.

Hit my API limit for the day with OpenAI, this confused me since I hadn’t put much into this agent so, I did the next thing. Asked ChatGPT about why this would happen with a paid subscription, and then I was hit with the abrupt answer of “My subscription does not give me anything more than the free tier access to their api”.

Well shit, so looking at the plan they offered that allowed me to actually do what I was doing almost tippled my price for access. So I decided to look else ware and I was glad I did.

While I was setting up Hermes I noticed that Nous Research the creators of Hermes have somewhat done all the hard work of integrating everything into Hermes with a fee that was cheaper than any other provider I could find. Not to mention they literally have a giant button that allows you to turn off training on your prompts.

So I dived in, and I am glad I did. I have created multiple agents and have connected them to different models that will fit their purpose, created automation and skills for my day to day tasks and have achieved all of this with only spending 5 bucks.

I currently have 2 agents that I have up and running, The first one is Nick who is my personal assistant. This agent currently looks at all my calendars and contacts and gives me a daily report of what I have on for the day as well as any upcoming birthdays. Sent to me on telegram every morning.

I also have Nick checking my emails for any work orders that come in and create events In my calendar as well as forwarding them to my ticketing system so they get picked up to.

My other agent is Wayne, he is a sprinkler enthusiast (If you’re in the area you will get the joke and hopefully why his name is Wayne) and is a Computer Tech, he currently access’s my servers that are being used to off site backups and gives me a report on their status, and even some recommendations of what might be going on with backups that have failed a few times.

I also have Hermes installed on my tech laptop and the value of just pulling up a prompt and saying “hey could you scan the network for a synology nas and give me the ip” and it actually doing this in a matter of seconds blows my mind.

I’ve been using them for about a month and honestly the costs are surprisingly low only costing me about $8 for the month with a fair bit of use and I will have to work on using it more to actually take advantage of my credit haha.

I’m glad I have decided to go down the AI rabbit hole, something that started as a fun little project is actually making my work life a lot easier.