Introduction
I'm going to let you in on a secret about my life. Here's what my morning looks like. Every morning an AI agent I built wakes up. It reads Hacker News, writes me a summary, and drops the whole thing on my phone before I've had my morning coffee. I don't even need any news apps. It sends it to me on Telegram. This is the Hermes agent, and it's doing things that even OpenClaw cannot do.
For those of you who haven't heard of Hermes, that's completely fine. I'm going to explain everything from the ground up, then show you some of the wildest demos I've seen in an AI tool this year. I've given this AI a list of tasks needed
- An Analyst
- An Assistant
- An Editor
- Three different subscription tools.
Not only did it accomplish all of them, it also cost me far less money than other tools. It cut my AI bill by a huge amount.
Hermes Agent
Let's start with the simplest explanation of what Hermes really is. Hermes is an AI agent built by Nous Research, one of the biggest open-source AI labs in the world. For those who don't know what an AI agent is, here's the easiest way to think about it: an agent does everything you ask it to on your computer. It can go to websites, click buttons, read things, write files, and send them back to you in a message. It can do all of this while you're sleeping, watching a movie, or sitting in a meeting. You hand it a job, and it simply gets the job done.
How Hermes Agent is different from Claude and ChatGPT
Here's why Hermes is different from typical AI agents. Every time Hermes finishes a task, it writes down what it learned, almost like maintaining a notebook for itself. The next time you ask it to do something similar, it doesn't start from scratch. It reads its own notes and runs much faster. Claude doesn't do this. ChatGPT doesn't do this. Nothing else I've tested does real self-learning like this. This feels genuinely new.
Image Source: https://docs.ollama.com/integrations/hermes
But what's even more interesting is where this entire industry is heading. Tools like Offsite AI are already experimenting with a future where humans and AI agents work together as one coordinated team. Instead of using isolated AI tools in separate tabs, platforms like Offsite let multiple specialized AI agents collaborate in real time developers, researchers, reviewers, and operators all working together alongside humans. Hermes feels like the beginning of that shift: from “using AI tools” to actually managing AI teammates.
The Problem: The Agent sleeps when we shutdown the laptop
Okay, But there's one problem. An agent that never sleeps needs a computer that never sleeps. Your laptop sleeps when you close the lid, and your agent stops with it. What you actually need is a server, a computer that lives on the internet 24/7 and stays online even when your Wi-Fi goes down.
That's where Hostinger comes in. The simplest way to think about Hostinger is that it rents you a small piece of a computer sitting in a data center somewhere. That computer runs around the clock. Since it's always on, your AI agent is also always on and available on every channel you connect it to. When you self-host on your own VPS, your data stays yours. Your agent runs in an isolated environment while still being able to connect with your tools when needed. Plus, Hermes actually remembers things. Hostinger uses persistent Docker volumes, which basically means every skill Hermes learns and every memory it builds survives restarts. So your agent gets smarter every single day instead of resetting back to zero. In the past, setting up a server was painful. Hostinger simplified all of it by creating a one-click template specifically for Hermes.
For first-time users, you pick the KVM 2 plan and click deploy. The 12-month option is the most affordable, and Hostinger also gives you 30 days to try it risk-free. After waiting about a minute, your agent is live.
For existing users, the setup is simple:
- Log into Hostinger
- Click VPS
- Click Manage
- Click One-Click Deploy
- Search for Hermes
- Click Select
- Copy the generated password
- Click Deploy
That's it. In about a minute, the project changes from “Created” to “Running.” Once it says running, click Open, log in, and you're ready.
Demo 1: Daily Hacker News PDF
Next, we connect Hermes to Telegram, because this is where things become really interesting. You don't need to log into dashboards or open apps anymore. You simply text the AI from your phone.
The setup takes less than a minute:
- Open Telegram
- Search for BotFather
- Type /newbot
- Give the bot a name
- BotFather sends you a token
- Paste the token into Hermes
- Hermes asks for your Telegram user ID
- Search for User Info Bot on telegram
- Copy your ID
- Paste it into Hermes
Done. Your bot is live.
Now comes the first demo. I send Hermes one message: “Go to Hacker News. Grab the top 15 posts. Capture the title, score, author, comment count, and URL. Save it as a PDF. Before you finish, write down what you learned.”
Hermes thinks for a second, picks the right skill on its own, opens Hacker News in a browser, reads all the posts, builds a PDF, and sends the PDF straight to my Telegram. That task alone saves me several minutes every morning.
Demo 2: YouTube Thumbnail Grid Generator
Next, I wanted to see if Hermes could generate and edit images. So I gave it another task: “Go to this YouTube channel. Grab the 12 most recent thumbnails. Combine them into a 4x3 PNG grid and send it back to me.”
OpenClaw could technically do this, but it required setting up scripts and often broke halfway through. Hermes handled everything automatically:
- Opened YouTube
- Pulled the channel
- Downloaded the thumbnails
- Used an image library
- Built the grid
- Saved the file
- Sent the PNG back to my phone
All in about 90 seconds. Then I wanted to push it even further.
Demo 3: Track your competitors
I asked Hermes to monitor four AI competitors:
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Google's Gemini
- xAI's Grok
I wanted Hermes to study their homepages, product pages, and blogs every day and send me a report explaining:
- New product launches
- Pricing updates
- Major announcements
- Anything important that changed
Hermes did something I had never seen another agent do before. It split itself into multiple agents. One agent handled OpenAI, another handled Anthropic, another handled Gemini, and another handled Grok. They all worked in parallel reading, summarizing, and comparing information simultaneously.
This used to be an actual paid role. Companies hired market intelligence analysts to do this exact work manually. A few minutes later, my Telegram received a complete AI competitor intelligence report in PDF format. Every company had its own section summarizing all recent changes.
Think about how different this is from a year ago. Back then, to do everything Hermes does today, I would have needed:
- A research analyst
- A content assistant
- A video producer
- Multiple software subscriptions
That could easily cost lakhs of rupees every year. Now, one tool can handle most of the repetitive work for a fraction of the cost.
I'm not saying you should replace your team. I'm saying you should free your team. Let Hermes handle the repetitive tasks:
- Scraping
- Summarizing
- First drafts
- Competitor monitoring
So your real team can focus on the work only humans can do. A year ago, none of this existed. Today, a single AI agent can perform the work that once required multiple people and tools working together.
Frequently asked questions
Q1: What is Hermes Agent?
Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent built by Nous Research that autonomously performs tasks on your computer browsing websites, reading files, writing documents, and sending results to you via messaging apps like Telegram. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, it writes down what it learns after every task, making it faster and smarter over time.
Q2: How is Hermes Agent different from ChatGPT and Claude?
Hermes Agent has a built-in self-learning loop after completing each task, it saves notes about what it learned. The next time it handles a similar task, it references those notes instead of starting from scratch. Neither ChatGPT nor Claude currently offer this kind of persistent task memory.
Q3: How do I run Hermes Agent 24/7 without keeping my laptop on?
You need to host Hermes on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) like Hostinger. With Hostinger's one-click Hermes template, you select the KVM 2 plan, deploy in about a minute, and your agent stays online around the clock — even when your laptop is off.
Q4: What tasks can Hermes Agent automate?
Hermes Agent can scrape and summarize websites, generate PDF reports, download and compile YouTube thumbnails, monitor competitor websites daily, schedule recurring tasks via cron jobs, and deliver all results directly to your Telegram fully autonomously.