I'm always a bit wary about doing write up on things like this, as I kind of just muddle things together and definitely don't follow best practices.
I used OpenClaw a while back, I did find it useful, but it wasn't as reliable.
This time around, I found hermes a lot easier to use and configure. One thing I think has improved it is building apps to "pre-compute" data.
For example, with my email, instead of accessing my email servers directly, I have an IMAP server running locally; with mbsync running to download all the mail from all my email accounts locally. Then, when I ask hermes for something in my email, it's much quicker, doesn't hit any rate limits, and gets the full email (gmail sometimes doesn't send the full body of the email).
With my travel and purchase tracking. I parse an e-mail once as it arrive (I use a frontier model to generate a script which can parse e-mails from that merchant in the future). The parsed data is added to a SQLite database.
I ask hermes what's the address of the place we're staying at next week, It generates a SQL query, and queries the database.
Much cheaper/quicker/reliable than searching my e-mails for booking confirmations, and then parsing the e-mail.
My (unscientific) theory, is that doing things like that is much more important than the model or agent you use.
I used OpenClaw a while back, I did find it useful, but it wasn't as reliable.
This time around, I found hermes a lot easier to use and configure. One thing I think has improved it is building apps to "pre-compute" data.
For example, with my email, instead of accessing my email servers directly, I have an IMAP server running locally; with mbsync running to download all the mail from all my email accounts locally. Then, when I ask hermes for something in my email, it's much quicker, doesn't hit any rate limits, and gets the full email (gmail sometimes doesn't send the full body of the email).
With my travel and purchase tracking. I parse an e-mail once as it arrive (I use a frontier model to generate a script which can parse e-mails from that merchant in the future). The parsed data is added to a SQLite database.
I ask hermes what's the address of the place we're staying at next week, It generates a SQL query, and queries the database.
Much cheaper/quicker/reliable than searching my e-mails for booking confirmations, and then parsing the e-mail.
My (unscientific) theory, is that doing things like that is much more important than the model or agent you use.