Building Practical Agents with Hermes Workshop

Build an agent that does something useful for you and lives where you work. From 0 to 1. This workshop is for you if you've never built an agent, or if you've built dozens and want to see how Hermes makes it easier.

What we'll cover

Part 1) Art of the Possible

• What's an agent - not a chatbot. Memory, tools, skills, and a schedule
• Real use cases - daily intelligence briefing, business KPI report, homelab health, incident triage, Chat over your data
• Why Hermes - works where you already work, self-improving skills, multi-platform, ease of setup
• Use-case brainstorm - figure out what you want to build before touching install

Part 2) Setup Your Agent

• Install and setup - Hermes on your machine, provider connected
• Connect where you work - gateway to Discord, Telegram, Slack, or Teams

Part 3) Make Your Agent Maximally Useful for You

• Build your agent - pick a use case, bootstrap a skill, run your first report
• Feedback loop - teach your skill to get sharper with every run
• Schedule and delivery - run your agent on a schedule, have it message you where you already work

What you'll leave with

• Your own AI Agent installed and working
• Connected to your messaging platform
• One agent skill bootstrapped for something you actually care about
• The pattern to build more

The mental model

Memory helps Hermes know you. Skills help Hermes know how. Cron and webhooks tell Hermes when to act. Gateway puts the result where humans already are.

Workshop paths

Path	What it does	Best if you
Daily Intelligence	Morning reports over your sources, ranked by what matters to you	Want a working agent fastest
Homelab Health	Read-only triage of disk, services, logs, containers	Run servers at home
Incident Triage	Turns monitoring webhooks into human triage summaries	Are on-call
ChatOps Over Your Data	Plain-language questions over CSVs, SQLite, logs	Query data by hand regularly

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Static Workshop Site

The MVP public site is built with VitePress from Markdown in docs/. Target domain: hermes.arcadian.cloud.

Run it locally:

npm install
npm run docs:dev

Build and preview the static output:

npm run docs:build
npm run docs:preview

Deploy with Vercel from the repository root:

vercel --prod

This repo is configured with vercel.json: Vercel runs npm run docs:build and publishes docs/.vitepress/dist. The local Vercel project link lives in .vercel/, which is intentionally gitignored. If you are on a fresh machine and vercel says the project is not linked, run:

vercel link

and choose the existing project that serves hermes.arcadian.cloud.

GitHub Pages deployment also exists in .github/workflows/pages.yml, but Vercel is the current direct deployment path for hermes.arcadian.cloud.