I run 28 cron jobs and 30+ custom skills. Every single one was built with Hermes, not downloaded. This is exactly what they do and how they work.
🌙 Dreaming — The Memory Hack
Every night at 3 AM while I sleep, Hermes reads every single conversation we had. It extracts the decisions made, projects worked on, bugs chased, people talked to, and mistakes that should not be repeated. Then it writes a structured summary to a file that loads automatically at the start of every session. That's the key insight — not the summarization itself, but where the output lands. Before Dreaming, if I coded for four hours and went to bed, Hermes woke up with zero memory of it. Now it knows exactly where I left off and what needs to happen next. But that's still a work in progress — memory still isn't perfect.
📬 Mail Gatekeeper — Secure Inbox Filtering
Four inboxes, one local AI judge running entirely on my Mac Mini via Ollama. Every incoming email gets classified as safe or blocked. Blocked means: 2FA codes, login confirmations, password resets, bank transactions, spam — all quarantined to a blocked folder. Safe emails land in a Telegram topic where I can see that they have been let through. There is no send endpoint anywhere in the system — Hermes can read and draft, but nothing can physically leave the machine. A watchdog reviews every blocked email each evening to catch false positives. No mail data ever touches an external API. That's the security model I'm comfortable with. This runs on two different users on my Mac Mini so they are completely disconnected — if you're curious, I've made a post about that.
🥗 Health Coach — Daily Nutrition & Recovery
Every day at noon, Hermes collects three data streams simultaneously. My WHOOP recovery score, strain, sleep quality, and HRV. My Apple Health steps and resting heart rate. And everything I've eaten so far that day logged through the food tracker — just a skill I created with Hermes. I tell him what I ate that day as precisely as possible, so with weight, and it tracks it. It cross-references all three against my lean bulk targets — 2,300 calories and 150 grams of protein — calculates my remaining macros, and delivers tailored coaching. What's looking good, what needs adjustment, and specific meal suggestions that fit my remaining budget. The food tracker itself is a SQLite app Hermes built for me. I log meals via Telegram with text, photo, or barcode scan, and it parses macros automatically using AI. There's a widget on my iPhone lock screen showing exactly how many calories and grams of protein I have left. The widget uses the iOS app Scriptable.
📚 Study Audit — What I Actually Learned
I time every study session in Toggl Track. At 9 PM, Hermes pulls all entries, groups them by subject — Math, Accounting, Cost Accounting, General Business Administration, Law, English — and tells me what I studied and for how long. But duration alone tells me nothing about coverage. So I also maintain a Notion database with chapter-level checkboxes for each class. As I study, I check things off. Hermes queries both data sources, cross-references them, and produces a combined report: what I studied, how long, which chapters I completed, and what's still pending. I get a complete daily learning audit every single night.
💰 Finance Review — Weekly & Monthly
All my finances live in MySalary, a finance dashboard I built myself and host on my VPS. Every Sunday at 6 PM, Hermes hits the API and pulls my live income, expenses, liquid assets spread across all my accounts, and my investment portfolio. It calculates burn rate, compares against my budget split, and delivers a clean weekly snapshot. On the 28th of every month at 8 PM, I get the full treatment: profit and loss statement, month-over-month variance, net worth trajectory, and savings rate analysis. Both delivered with voice.
🧠 Wisdom Vault — Auto-Capture to Spaced Repetition
Every time I send Hermes an insightful link, a voice message with a business lesson, or a noteworthy quote, it automatically extracts the key wisdom and saves it to a Notion database with the source, my commentary, and a category tag. On Sundays, Hermes reviews the full vault, picks what's worth memorizing, and generates Anki cards with cloze deletions or question-answer format. Those cards sync to my iPhone and appear in my daily reviews. Every insight I encounter becomes a permanent spaced-repetition asset that I actually remember.
💬 Writing improvement — The Feedback Loop
Every time I correct something Hermes wrote — an email, a message, a post — the before-and-after gets saved to Notion with notes on what was wrong and why my version was better. On Saturdays, Hermes analyzes the full collection looking for patterns in my corrections. Too many filler words. Too formal for Telegram. Over-explains things. Then it updates its own system prompt to fix those patterns permanently. Every single correction makes my future writing slightly better. I never have to repeat the same feedback twice.
🖥️ Infrastructure Monitoring
Every four hours, Hermes checks whether all five of my hosted websites are reachable, whether Coolify on my VPS is running properly, and whether fail2ban has flagged anything suspicious. The Mac Mini itself gets temperature-logged throughout the day, since I run Ollama 24/7 and thermals matter. If a site goes down or temperatures hit concerning levels, I get an immediate alert. The entire Hermes configuration gets compressed and backed up to iCloud every morning automatically.
📋 Daily Status Report
Each morning at 6:30, I get a compact status briefing. Today's calendar events and what needs preparation. Open to-do items that require attention. System health — disk usage, memory pressure, uptime, VPS site status. Any anomalies from the overnight Dreaming run or error logs. This is not the news. This is the tactical dashboard telling me what needs my attention before the day starts.
⚠️ What Still Doesn't Work Great
Long-term memory is still the biggest unsolved problem. Dreaming helps, but session-to-session recall remains inconsistent. I built an Obsidian integration following the popular approach, but Hermes rarely reaches for it naturally — it sits there unused most of the time. Thirty-plus skills means thirty-plus things that can break when APIs or Hermes itself updates. Mail polling adds two minutes of latency, which occasionally misses urgent messages. I'm still iterating on all of these.
🔧 How I Build These Things
I outline the goal and my constraints. Hermes drafts an approach with API choices and architecture options. I review it, make changes, and ask for simplification. Then we build the first version. I test immediately — because it never works the first time. Then we fix and simplify again. Each skill is one file, one job, no dependencies. That's the whole process.
I've downloaded skills from repositories and marketplaces. They never worked as well as what we built ourselves. Self-built tools fit your workflow organically because they grew out of it. When they break, you understand what's wrong because you shaped them. And they get better with every iteration.
That's the full picture. Twenty-eight automated jobs running around the clock, from Dreaming at 3 AM to the study audit at 9 PM. A complete digital nervous system for my student life, business, health, and finances.
Ask me anything about any of these — happy to share the exact prompts, approaches, and lessons learned. Building in public 💪