Hermes as a research intern

A morning report on your beat that only tells you what’s new.

Agent: Hermes by Nous Research MIT · 219k GitHub stars v0.19.0 · July 2026 Web tools: paid (Nous Portal, metered)

Hermes is Nous Research’s open-source agent: a terminal CLI plus a messaging gateway daemon. This plan joins three of its features into one loop. The built-in cron scheduler starts a run every morning. The agent searches your beat, and when a source is awkward (a PDF quarterly report, a CSV dump, HTML from 2009) it writes itself a scraper and keeps it. Then it checks what it already told you before writing anything. The report lands in Telegram before you’re up.

It’s for sources that are open but hard to read. It respects paywalls, robots.txt, rate limits and terms of service. If a source is closed, buy a subscription or an API key.

Effort and cost. Budget an evening to get the first report running by hand, then a week of mornings tuning the briefing before you trust the cron. Every run spends LLM tokens plus metered Nous Portal calls, and a daily schedule multiplies both by thirty a month. The traps page covers how to cap that. I checked all of this against the Hermes docs at v0.19.0, July 2026.

The plan in six parts

1What you getthe morning report, mocked up 2Product specwho it’s for, one morning, and what it won’t do 3Architecturecron → agent → tools → Telegram, and how the memory works 4Set it upinstall, Docker backend, gateway and cron in about 40 minutes 5The promptsfive prompts to paste in order 6The trapswhat goes wrong once the cron takes over

Is this for you?

Yes, if you already check one beat every morning across five tabs (an industry, a research field, some competitors) and half the sources fight copy-paste. Skip it if someone’s newsletter already covers the beat, or if an unattended search bill makes you nervous. I left out splitting work across agents, RSS and using Hermes as a coding agent (that’s № 1 in this series).