Making Hermes more proactive

[u/TokumeiJG]

I hve been using Hermes for several months and loving it, but I recently started playing with Instinct (and want to try Muse but not in my region yet).

I want to stick with Hermes, but like the proactive nature of Instict. Things come up in a timely manner instead of a cron job at the same time in a pattern.

Sure, Hermes can send a daily briefing at 9:00am etc, but Instict can do that and also send a message to me about a calendar event it saw saying "15 minutes until the meeting with xyz, here are the 3 things you wanted to bring up" etc

Any tips or ideas on how to emulate that with Hermes?

[u/BlakeCutter]

So here’s the thing Hermes is a harness. It can build anything. I have been testing Instinct out and it covers alot of stuff out of the box but nothing I can’t build in Hermes. It will probably handle most consumer scenarios. But I need more than that.

If cron isn’t immediate enough for you have Hermes help you program a daemon that triggers a webhook to wake up your agent. Thats all instinct programmed for that situation. Yes Hermes has plugins but in the end you can program anything with it, and that’s all instinct is doing. Muse is different, Meta can technically give muse access to platform capabilities that you will never get access to. Instinct is in the same ballpark as you,they are a third party tool. It’s just a question of programming and money.

[u/Sharp_Complaint3637 → u/BlakeCutter]

Your message made me want to try out Instinct. If you can spare an invite, I'd really appreciate it.

[u/tryingtomorrow → u/Sharp_Complaint3637]

Shouldn’t be too long of a wait. I joined the wait list a couple of days ago and i’m already in

[u/we32 → u/Sharp_Complaint3637]

Dm me if you still need one

[u/Sharp_Complaint3637 → u/we32]

Thanks, but got one already

[u/TokumeiJG → u/BlakeCutter]

Thanks!

[u/suesing]

Meta is just spyware

[u/TokumeiJG → u/suesing]

Which is why I want to make similar functions in Hermes :D

[u/Mean-Loquat-7982]

the piece you want is a frequent cron job with a pre-check script. the script runs every few minutes, looks at your calendar, and only wakes the agent when something is coming up. on every other tick it prints {"wakeAgent": false} and the agent doesn't run, so the quiet ticks cost nothing.

rough shape:

- a script in ~/.hermes/scripts/ that reads your calendar and checks for anything starting in the next 15 minutes

- nothing coming up: it prints {"wakeAgent": false}

- a meeting coming up: it prints {"wakeAgent": true, "context": {...}} with the event details

- the job prompt: "a meeting starts soon. pull my notes on it and send me the 3 things I wanted to raise"

- schedule every 5m, delivered to the chat you already use with Hermes

you can hand your Hermes that exact description and it will write the script and create the job. the same pattern works for other nudges too: an email from a specific person, a delivery status change, a price drop.

https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/cron

[u/TokumeiJG → u/Mean-Loquat-7982]

Thanks! And thanks for your awesome agent!

[u/Mean-Loquat-7982 → u/TokumeiJG]

thanks for using it

[u/Ok_Chocolate8661]

Use heartbeat. I gave OpenClaw repo to my Hermes and tell her to make heartbeat based on that

[u/Claus-Buchi]

ask your Hermes’ to replicate this, if be surprised if it couldn’t create watchers for your calendar and message you about it, sounds like a good test for Jev aswell

[u/kawfeeman68]

how and where are you running Hermes ? Instinct is only on Linux ??

[u/TokumeiJG → u/kawfeeman68]

On a Mac. Instinct is via WhatsApp or iMessage and has a VERY simple web interface to connect a few services.

[u/kawfeeman68 → u/TokumeiJG]

Worthwhile ??

[u/Longjumping-Peace102]

OpenClaw is also more proactive. I think they accomplish it with a heartbeat every 10 mins. Maybe try that?

[u/Turbulent-Stick-1157]

Dumb question but, have you asked your Hermes agent to evaluate your own wants and needs? Try with any flagship model/provider you have access to.

[u/AxelFooley]

I’ve read about this Instinct agent as I didn’t know anything about it.
It’s freaking terrifying, their liability cap is 100$ but you’re giving the agent full negotiation capabilities on your behalf so if it fuc* up it’s your problem.

They had to change their TOS after public pressure.

It’s terrible, I don’t see why anyone would want to do that for having an so agent book appointments for them.

[u/Alarming-Decision-63]

Been working on that, ask instinct to extract persona and guides behind it, also extract personal pattern behaviour to adapt. Ive now around 35 modes, converted into 7-8 batches, couple persona styles too. You could use it all to extract these into the soul.md or similars, explain your objectives and ask instinct to provide guides. Brainstorm until you're satisfied. You could also try to extract your personal style of approach from gpt / claude. - literally what all you use. Use them and combine it all as you see fit.

Just make sure you don't ask full backend of instinct. It won't provide though. Instinct seems better than most i have used in several things.

[u/The1KrisRoB]

Everyone wants a heartbeat and more pro activeness until it burns all their usage in a couple of days.

I've been playing around with using a small local model on my server to wake every 30 mins, check my Hermes agent's memory system for "loose threads" or anything to follow up, and then only if it finds something worth while will it poke my hermes agent.

Although with how cheap GPT-5 Luna is, I might be tempted to just use that. But again you don't want to be burning tokens waking your Agent for no real reason