Hermes

The homelab runs a lot of services. Monitoring them, keeping tabs on the shop's ad performance, drafting blog posts, triaging email — these are all automatable tasks that were being done manually or not at all.

Hermes started as a simple Telegram bot that could answer questions about home assistant sensors. It grew into a full agent system when it became clear that the same pattern — receive task, decide what to do, do it, report back — applied to almost everything I wanted to automate.

The philosophy is local-first. No OpenAI API bill, no data leaving the house. The RTX 3090 handles a 35B parameter model at full quality with 65k context. Good enough for everything Hermes needs to do.

A central gateway process (Flask) receives Telegram messages and webhook callbacks. It routes to the appropriate plugin based on message content and context.

Each plugin is a directory with a SKILL.md describing what it does and a scripts/ subdirectory of Python scripts it can invoke. Plugins are loosely coupled — they share nothing but a common interface.

Cron jobs run scheduled tasks (research, content generation, market data) and pipe results through the same Telegram approval loop. Urgent items ping immediately; batch items queue for morning review.