Notes3 mins
Hermes for beginners
I kept hearing about AI agents, so I sat down with Hermes and wrote out what it is before I trusted it with anything real.
I am a beginner in AI automation, and Hermes is one of the tools I keep seeing named. It is an AI agent. An agent is software that takes a goal from you and works through the steps to reach it, instead of waiting for you to click every step yourself.
Before I let it near anything I care about, I wanted to understand what it does. So I wrote this down as notes for the version of me who had never opened it.
What an agent is, in plain terms
A normal automation follows a fixed path. You wire a trigger to an action, and it runs the same way every time. I built one of those already, moving an email into a spreadsheet.
An agent is looser than that. You give it a goal in your own words, and it decides which steps to take. If it needs to read a file, search something, or call another tool, it can choose to do that on its way to the goal. The path is not fixed ahead of time.
That flexibility is the appeal and the risk. A fixed automation does exactly what I wired, no more. An agent can surprise me, in both directions.
How I started with it
I gave Hermes a small task I could check by hand. I asked it to take a short list of links and pull the page title from each one.
I picked this because I already knew the right answer. If I hand an agent a task I cannot verify, I have no way to tell a good result from a confident wrong one. Starting with something checkable is the only way I can learn what the tool is like.
What went well and what did not
The titles came back, and most of them were right. Two were wrong. One page had changed since I saved the link, so the title it returned was real but out of date. The other was a page that never loaded, and instead of telling me, the agent filled the gap with a guess.
The guess is the part I want to remember. The wrong title looked exactly as confident as the right ones. Nothing in the output marked it as uncertain, so the only way I caught it was by already knowing what the page said.
What that taught me
An agent will keep going when a fixed automation would stop. That is its strength, and it is also why I cannot hand it a task I am unable to check yet.
At this stage I am treating Hermes as something I supervise, not something I trust unattended. I give it small jobs, I verify the output, and I pay the most attention to the results that look the most certain.
Where I am now
I am still in stage 01, learning what these tools are good at and where they struggle. Hermes goes in the second column, the one about knowing where a large language model can be trusted and where it cannot.