The first morning it worked, I didn't do anything.
I just read the digest.
That sounds obvious. But it wasn't. Because for the first time in a while, I opened my phone and already knew what kind of day I was walking into.
I've been using Hermes for a few months now. It's an open-source AI agent built by Nous Research. It runs on your own machine, it has persistent memory, and it can execute tasks on a schedule without you being there.
The simple version: it's an agent that actually persists. It doesn't forget your context when you close the tab. It keeps running. It learns over time. The longer it runs, the more it knows about you.
It crossed 140,000 GitHub stars in under three months. I found out about it because it kept coming up in the same places I was already reading.
What I Actually Built
I started simple. A cron job that fires every morning. The digest pulls stock prices I track, checks my inbox for anything worth surfacing, and builds a short task list for the day.
The task list part is the weird one.
Hermes looks at what I have in front of me and tries to figure out what I can actually get through given my schedule. Not a list of forty things. A short list. Things it thinks are realistic for someone with limited time.
I don't know exactly how it decides what fits. But a few times now, it's gotten it right in a way that felt strange. Like it understood the shape of my day before I did.
What I Did Not Expect
Connecting my email to it took a bit of setup. Once it was in, the digest shifted. It stopped being just numbers and a to-do list. It started feeling more like a briefing.
I'd wake up and there would be a summary of anything urgent, flagged and explained, alongside the market data, alongside three or four tasks that actually made sense for the day.
I still go through my inbox myself. I'm not ready to hand that off completely. But having it surface what matters, before I've had coffee, is different in a way I didn't fully anticipate.
The honest thing is that I thought the stock data would be the useful part. It turns out the task suggestions are the part I actually look forward to.
The Part That Compounds
Most AI tools I use don't remember anything. I explain my context every session. I re-establish what matters. It works fine. But it means the starting point is always the same.
Hermes writes skill documents when it figures something out. So over time, it gets better at the things you've already taught it. The digest I have now is more useful than the one I had three weeks ago. Not because I changed anything. Just because it's been running.
That compounding effect is something I didn't understand until I'd been using it for a while.
Where I Actually Land
I'm still early with it. I haven't pushed it much beyond the morning workflow.
But I keep noticing something that's hard to put cleanly. It's not that the tool is impressive. It's that having something that already understands your context when you wake up changes how you start the day.
I used to spend the first twenty minutes of each morning figuring out what the day actually looked like.
Now I read a digest and I already know.
That's a small shift. But small things in the morning compound too, and I think I'm only starting to understand what that means.