Most people install Hermes, send it a task, get a mediocre result, and blame the tool.

The tool is fine.

The problem is they never set it up right to begin with.

Think about it. If you hired a personal assistant and they showed up on day one, would you sit them down and say nothing?

Would you just have them start working on a task without giving them any context on your goals and what you’re building?

Of course not.

But that's exactly what most people do with Hermes.

And it's why they're not getting anywhere close to what it can actually do.

So today, I’m going to show you how to set it up correctly so you can get the absolute most out of it from day one.

Before we dig in, a quick note on Hermes vs. OpenClaw: I was a big OpenClaw guy. Still respect what they're building. But right now, Hermes is the way to go. It's lighter, faster, and most importantly, it doesn't break every time there's an update. If you've ripped your hair out after an OpenClaw update, you know what I mean.

1. Tell it who you are.

First thing you do after installing: open Hermes and tell it three things.

Who you are. What you're working on. What your goals are.

That's it. This goes straight into Hermes' memory. And because Hermes has the best memory of any AI agent out there, it will use this context for EVERYTHING it does going forward. Skip this step and you're running a powerful employee with zero context. Don't skip this step.

2. Set a nightly cron job.

A cron job is just a scheduled task, which you can set up just using plain English.

Here's the prompt I use:

"Schedule a task for yourself to do every night at 2am. It should be a micro app, UI, or system that helps us get closer to my personal goals and ambitions. Make sure it surprises me and makes me happy."

Hit enter. Walk away.

You wake up, something new exists. That's your AI employee working the night shift while you sleep.

3. Use the Kanban triage queue every morning.

Every morning, I write down my to-do list on paper.

Then I take every task an AI can handle and drop it into the Hermes Kanban triage queue.

Hermes takes each task, breaks it into subtasks, assigns them to subagents, and gets to work.

I go make breakfast. Come back. Half my list is done.

That's not an exaggeration. That's how I operate every single day.

Once Hermes knows you, your goals, your workflows, your preferences, it stops being a fancy chatbot. And instead, it becomes an actual employee.

One that gets better every single time you use it.

Want to go deeper on this?

I run a live Hermes bootcamp every Friday inside the Vibe Coding Academy. We build together, live, every week.

​Join the Vibe Coding Academy here.​

Keep shipping,

Alex