What you get
There’s no new screen. HA keeps its dashboards, and Hermes is a Telegram contact that sometimes acts and sometimes asks.
Here’s one Wednesday evening, with HA events on the left and Hermes’ decisions on the right.
(A static mock of the gateway session log, tidied up. Entity IDs are examples.)
Wednesday evening · gateway sessionmodel: your cheap one
HA eventHermes
17:42
sun.sun → below_horizon
ha_call_service light.turn_on → light.living_room_lampMEMORY.md: “lamps on within 10 min of sunset on weekdays”
17:58
person.asha → home
ha_call_service climate.set_temperature 21.5 → climate.hallwaypattern: home ~18:00 Tue/Thu; pre-warm the hallway
18:31
binary_sensor.kitchen_motion → on
no action: kitchen motion at dinner time is normal, and the cooldown holds further motion events for 30 s
20:47
cover.garage_door open since 19:15 (92 min)
Telegram → you: “The garage has been open for an hour and a half, which is unusual for a Wednesday night. Want me to close it? Closing anything is on manual approval, so I’ll wait for a yes.”
20:48
you, on Telegram: “yes”
ha_call_service cover.close_cover → cover.garage_doorapproved · logged to the session
23:30
cron → pattern-distiller fires
memory add: “garage left open evenings ~1×/week; nudge after 60 min”MEMORY.md now 1,986 / 2,200 chars, one stale rule dropped to make room
Where each part comes from
- The reasons under each action come from
~/.hermes/memories/MEMORY.md. - The 23:30 job is yours to build. Architecture shows where it fits and the prompts build it.
- Asking first comes from
approvals.modeplus your house rules (setup).
The first week, it’s a needy housemate. By week three, memory holds about fifteen rules and you get one or two useful messages a day.