Agent stack build plans · № 5

Hermes as a live news-to-content pipeline

Cron jobs watch your beat, three delegated roles turn stories into drafts, and the queue lands in your Telegram — with a human between the pipeline and the publish button.

CLI + gateway: hermes MIT · 219k GitHub stars v0.19.0 · July 2026 web tools need Nous Portal (paid, metered)

Hermes is Nous Research’s open-source agent — a terminal CLI plus a hermes gateway daemon that lives in your messaging apps. This plan wires it into a working editorial desk for one beat: scheduled cron runs search the web and X for movement on your topics, and when a story clears your bar, a Researcher, a Summarizer, and a Fact-Checker — spawned as isolated subagents via delegate_task, each on a model suited to its job — turn it into a draft in your house voice. Drafts arrive in Telegram or Slack several times a day. You approve, edit, or spike. Nothing publishes itself.

What you end up with: a morning queue of two or three drafts, each carrying its source links, a claim-by-claim fact-check table, and a house-style score — plus honest “nothing cleared the bar” messages on quiet runs. The voice lives in two real Hermes mechanisms: a short SOUL.md persona and a house-style skill (SKILL.md) you invoke at drafting time — so the voice survives restarts, model swaps, and your own drift.

Honest effort: an evening to first draft, then a week of supervised runs before you trust the cadence. Honest cost: the web tools (web_search, web_extract, x_search, the cloud browser) run through the paid, metered Nous Portal tool gateway — and a pipeline’s whole job is calling them on a schedule. The traps page does the multiplication before your first invoice does.

The plan, in six parts

1What you getthe draft queue, as a working mock — sources, fact-check status, style score, spike button 2Product specwho this is for, a day on the desk, and what it deliberately refuses to do 3Architecturecron → Portal web tools → three delegated roles → Telegram; every “you build this” marked 4Set it upinstall, gateway pairing, SOUL.md and the skill, cron — real commands and file paths 5The promptsstaged and paste-able: the voice, the watchlist, the desk, then human eyes on a sample draft 6The trapsthe Portal bill × cron, rubber-stamp fact-checks, silent scrape failures, the auto-publish itch

Is this for you?

Yes, if you already spend an hour-plus a day reading feeds to write a newsletter, a beat blog, or devrel updates, and the bottleneck is drafting, not judgment. Skip it if you wanted a machine that publishes while you sleep — this plan never connects the pipeline to a CMS, on purpose; the human approval step is the point, not a limitation. Scope cuts: this is a news cadence (hours), not deep multi-day research — that’s № 3, the research intern; and it drafts, it doesn’t distribute — pushing approved pieces to your channels is a different job. One correction up front, because other guides get it wrong: Hermes has no built-in RSS reader (as of v0.19.0). Monitoring here is cron + search + extract, honestly labelled, with an optional RSS-to-webhook bridge you build yourself.