This page mirrors my original Substack article inside EricRhea.com. The original remains available at advisoryhour.substack.com.
What I find works more reliably in Hermes is the scheduling system. It’s a little difficult to explain, but I find I can get a more complex scheduled routine to run daily in my messaging platform of choice over Claw. Some of this is a result of the last two months of pretty violent change to OpenClaw. I suspect it’ll bounce back, but until then I had real work I wanted done.
The Idea
The idea I setup Hermes with was somewhat single-minded. I’d have Hermes simply present a proposal every day. And each day I’d either have to approve or reject the proposal. if I did nothing, then the proposal waited until I could make the time to review it. That simple loop is gold.
What works well about this is that Hermes gradually learns what it is you’re wanting to achieve-even if you can’t quite articular it yourself. It’s ok to have a vague idea. I have plenty of those. Put enough of them together and you end up with spaghetti, which is a tasty meal.
What I appreciate most about Hermes over Claw in this regard is that the timed schedule just works. I don’t have heartbeat.md issues or challenges with the cron system. Instead, Hermes is closest to what I feel is the ideal end state: a recursive loop that’s grounded on an idea approval path, but that also learns over time how to make itself better: better suggestions, better proposals, better everything.
This is an example of the storyboards Hermes provides:
Having an agent build out a full storyboard is quite an interesting and powerful unlock. This is like getting a full PRD every day. Sometimes it’s not so great-and sometimes it captures my attention. “Oh, that’s interesting. Let’s see that one!”
Lessons in full project pitches
Having a full project pitch every day can also be overwhelming. This is why it’s important to have a stop or way out: don’t generate a new pitch if you haven’t fully reviewed the day prior. If you have time, after all, you can always generate multiple on any given day.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.