What people actually use it for
Themed from independent sources (HN, DEV, Reddit), not just Nous marketing. Confidence flags: demoed real/user-reported · community claimed · illustrative promo "you could". The project is also heavily astroturfed, so weight the flags.
| Theme | Real examples | Conf. |
|---|---|---|
| Business / sales / BI | Lead-gen bot that closed real deals (find→contact→score). NL data gateway over BigQuery/Stripe/Amplitude via Slack for non-tech staff. Weekly MRR/churn report. Lead qualification via webhook. | demoed |
| Research / intelligence | Daily HN/Reddit/YouTube digest → email/Telegram. Market-research "idea factory" mining Reddit+HN for complaints. arXiv reader. Self-improving wiki "second brain". | demoed |
| Ops / monitoring | Self-healing server (cron checks Docker/disk, auto-restarts, Telegram-alerts). Incident-commander toolkits. CI loops. Broken-link monitoring. | illustrative |
| Content creation | UGC ad studio (product URL → ad copy via Meta Ads Library scraping). Research→write→thumbnail "content factory". X/Twitter autoposting (no API cost). Podcast→show-notes. | community |
| Personal assistant | Weekday inbox briefing → Slack. Family group agent (calendars + shopping list). Voice coach, journaling→Obsidian, always-on on a Pi/Mac mini. | community |
| Coding / dev | Multi-agent Plan→Code→QA→Ship (different model per role). Code review that learns your prefs. Hermes-as-MCP-server for Cursor/Claude Desktop. | community |
| Support / community | Multi-channel customer service (WhatsApp/IG/email/Reviews). Discord/Slack team assistants with per-user auth + human approval gate. | illustrative |
| Trading / finance | Weather-derivatives & Polymarket bots, earnings trackers. (Headline P&L claims least verified — treat with suspicion.) | illustrative |
What WE'd use it for — across everything we run
Mapped to the fleet, the digital products, lead-gen and monitoring. Ranked by value we don't already have. Left-border/tag: new capability · upgrade · handle with care.
Outreach engine #1 new
The biggest untapped lever. Prospect → personalise → send → follow-up → route replies to Telegram. Sell the digital products, chase cold FundBiz/MI/MHQ leads, and run SEO mention/backlink outreach (your own research: mentions > backlinks).
agentmail · telephony (Twilio SMS + AI calls) · domain-intel · osint-investigation
Phone-driven fleet ops #2 new
Message from Telegram — "is peptideclear live?", "leads today?", "run the fleet audit" — and it executes server-side, no laptop. Cross-platform, voice-memo capable. Fixes the "I'm on my phone" gap in your rc-session workflow.
gateway (Telegram/WhatsApp) · terminal · subagents
Always-on crons (kills laptop-sleep) #3 new
Host the time-sensitive jobs off your sleeping Mac: broker lead notifications (the PENDING delay), daily questions/blogs, weekly intelligence, site-audit, fleet-reality. Never miss because the lid's shut.
cron blueprints · webhook (Supabase/Stripe/GitHub) · deliver → telegram/email
Alert → action loop upgrade
Today form-canary / FLEET_REALITY just tell you. Hermes receives the same alert and acts (or you reply "fix it"). Webhooks can watch CF deploys + GitHub events too.
webhook triggers · HMAC · deliver_only relay
Research & intelligence on a schedule upgrade
Automate exactly the Gumroad/Flippa/competitor/AI-visibility scans we just ran — deliver weekly digests to your phone. The `news-digest` cron + web tools is this out-of-the-box.
web_search (free+paid) · scrapling (CF bypass) · browser · news-digest cron
Data on tap upgrade
The proven BigQuery/Stripe pattern, but for your Supabase: "how many real leads this week, by site?" answered in Telegram — without opening the dashboard.
webhook/Supabase · code_execution (pandas) · gateway
Content & ad assets upgrade
The "UGC ad studio" pattern for the digital products: generate ad copy + creative, blog illustrations, memes. Complements our nanobanana pipeline.
image_generate (fal/openai/xai) · baoyu-article-illustrator · meme-generation
Build NEW standalone things care
Fine for new, throwaway work — product landing pages, the SEO funnel sites, micro-tools, the Etsy store (Shopify skill). NEVER the core fleet repos — two agents editing the same Astro repos is the clobbering mess FLEET_REALITY exists to prevent.
cloudflare-temporary-deploy · shopify · terminal/file · subagent-driven-dev
The capabilities that back this up
Read from the actual repo — the tools/skills that make the above real.
| Area | What actually ships |
|---|---|
| Web / research | web_search + extract with 8 backends incl. free (ddgs, brave, searxng); scrapling (Cloudflare-Turnstile bypass); domain-intel (subdomains/WHOIS/DNS, no keys); osint-investigation (EDGAR/OpenCorporates/court/news); parallel-cli (deep research, enrichment, FindAll). |
| Browser | Stealth local browser (Camofox+CDP) + cloud (browserbase/firecrawl); navigate/click/type/scroll/vision/CDP; full computer-use. |
| Outreach | agentmail (agent's own inbox, autonomous send/receive); built-in email platform; telephony (persistent Twilio number, SMS + AI outbound calls via Bland/Vapi). |
| E-commerce | shopify skill — full Admin + Storefront GraphQL (products/orders/inventory/customers/metafields). |
| Web build + deploy | cloudflare-temporary-deploy (live Worker URL, 60-min throwaway); page-agent copilot; terminal/file/patch tools to author sites. |
| Image / content | image_generate (fal/openai/xai/krea) + video_generate; article-illustrator, memes, concept-diagrams, pixel-art. |
| Automation | 14 cron blueprints (morning-brief, important-mail, news-digest…), deliver to telegram/discord/email; webhook triggers from GitHub/Stripe/Supabase/monitoring with HMAC; full MCP (client + can serve as MCP server); subagents. |
| Memory | Agent-curated persistent memory (8 backends incl. Honcho/mem0), FTS5 cross-session search + LLM recall. |
| Runs off-laptop | 6 backends: local, Docker (s6), SSH, Singularity, Modal & Daytona serverless (scale-to-zero, ~£0 idle). Hetzner $5–10 VPS is the common recipe. |
Gap to note: no dedicated keyword-volume / SERP-rank tool ships in-repo — we'd wire our DataForSEO via an MCP or the web tools.
How to run it safely
This is a self-hosted messaging agent with shell access + our keys — a genuinely sensitive class. The research surfaced named CVEs and a supply-chain wave of malicious community skills. So:
Claude Code = the workshop
Build/deploy the fleet, deep work, on your Mac + your gates. Unchanged.
Hermes = the always-on foreman
A $5 VPS on the Claude API: crons, lead/broker alerts, monitors, outreach, phone-ops. Owns distinct lanes, not the repos.
The safety rules
- Self-host only (VPS/Modal), point it at the Claude API — keep content quality ours, avoid the default Llama/Hermes model.
- Telegram only to start; set session scope to per-peer (the default shared `main` session leaks data between users).
- Vetted skills only. Do NOT install community "skills" — ~1,184 malicious packages were caught. Use core tools + a handful of official skills you've read.
- Scope the keys. Give it a limited-permission Supabase/CF/Resend token set — never your master keys. Wall the fleet Astro repos off entirely.
- Sandbox + private mesh — run in Docker with read-only root, put it behind Tailscale (no exposed ports), treat all web/email content as untrusted (prompt-injection).
The honest risks
Why this isn't a slam-dunk
- Security: named CVEs (one-click RCE + token exfil), prompt-injection exfiltration, and the malicious-skill supply chain. Real, not theoretical.
- Fragmentation: adds a third actor alongside your sessions + crons — the exact clobbering FLEET_REALITY was invented to stop. Must own separate lanes.
- Maturity: fast, breaking changes; a release broke cron; `claw migrate` has silent-failure bugs. Research-grade, not battle-tested.
- Credibility noise: heavy astroturfing accusations + a plagiarism dispute the maintainer reportedly handled badly. Doesn't break the tool, but temper the hype.
- Overkill check: if all you want is "crons don't miss when the laptop sleeps," a $5 VPS running your existing Python is simpler. Hermes earns its keep only if you also want the outreach + phone-agent.
Recommended pilot — one lane, one week
Don't migrate anything. Prove the two new capabilities cheaply, with the fleet walled off.
Give it ONE job first: the broker lead notifications (your clearest always-on pain) + let you query fleet status from Telegram.
Then, if it proves out: add the outreach engine for the digital products (agentmail on a separate sending domain, low-volume personalised) — the highest-value new lever. Migrate more crons only after a clean week.
Cost to find out: a few pounds + an evening. If the "leads fire instantly + I run the fleet from my phone + outreach that actually sends" value is real, expand. If not, bin it — nothing on the fleet was touched.