12 ways to put Hermes Agent to work this week

Hey Vibe Marketer,

Hermes just became the most-used AI agent in the world.

On May 10, it hit #1 on OpenRouter's global rankings. 224 billion tokens processed in a single day, past OpenClaw's 186 billion.

It got there fast: 140,000+ GitHub stars in roughly three months since its February launch. And, it's pulling people off OpenClaw based on a Reddit sentiment analysis that found around 30% have already switched.

So what is it, why does it matter for marketers, and how do you actually set it up?

Why Hermes as your marketing agent?

Hermes is an open-source AI agent that runs 24/7, remembers everything, and works across Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, and your terminal.

Three things make it different from everything else you've tried.

It remembers. Most AI tools forget you the moment you close the tab. Hermes writes to its own memory after every completed task. Week two, it already knows how you work. Month two, it runs your workflows without being told.

It's stable. The agents that came before it, OpenClaw included, required constant restarts. Some people were restarting the gateway every hour. Hermes has been running for weeks without a restart for most users. That's the difference between a tool and an employee.

It's cheap to run. Connected to OpenRouter, a hub that gives you access to 200+ AI models through one account. You pick the model per task. GPT-5.5 for complex work. Cheaper models for background monitoring. You see exactly what each task costs and control it.

How to set it up (terminal, ~20 minutes)

What it costs:

Step 1 — Install Hermes

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Step 2 — Connect OpenRouter

Go to openrouter.ai → create a free account → generate an API key. The installer will drop you into a provider picker — select OpenRouter and paste your key. (To change it later, run hermes model.)

Step 3 — Connect Telegram

The setup wizard will ask if you want to connect a messaging platform, choose Telegram.

It needs a bot token. Open Telegram, message @BotFather, send /newbot, and copy the token it gives you. Paste it into the wizard.

Then run hermes gateway in terminal to start it up. Now, you can text your agent from your phone.

Think of it this way

OpenRouter is the brain - it connects Hermes to whichever AI model you want: a top model for complex work, cheaper ones for lighter tasks, whatever fits.

Telegram is the interface - it's how you talk to your agent, send it tasks, and get results back. From your phone. While you're doing something else.

Together, Hermes can:

• Research topics and send you a summary

• Monitor competitors weekly

• Draft content on demand

• Run the same task every day without being asked

Now, what if you want to pull live social data, what's actually being upvoted on Reddit right now, which YouTube video on your topic blew up this week?

Huge shoutout to Corey Ganim, one of the AI marketing practitioners and mentors in The Vibe Marketer community, who shared a free open-source skill called last30days that does exactly that.

You give it a topic, it reads what people actually posted about it in the last 30 days: Reddit threads with upvotes and comments, YouTube videos with view counts and transcripts, Hacker News discussions.

You see what's resonating, what people are pushing back on, what questions keep coming up. That's your content brief, your hook, your angle straight from the source.

It's free and open-source, and the core sources (Reddit, Hacker News, Polymarket) work with no API key. Install it from the repo — the Install section has the exact steps for your setup: github.com/mvanhorn/last30days-skill

Once it's installed, test it by messaging Hermes /last30days AI marketing tools. If a research brief comes back, you're set.

Quick tip: set a schedule so you actually use it

/cron is the plain-English scheduler. You tell Hermes a task and how often, and it runs on its own. Results land straight in Telegram.

/cron add "0 8 * * 1" "Run last30days on [your niche] questions and problems, summarize the top 5 recurring questions, and send to Telegram"

0 8 * * 1 = every Monday at 8am. You can also use plain intervals like every 1d or every 6h.

12 use cases to play with this week:

Who is this actually for?

Here's the honest breakdown:

a. /last30days is the research layer. It reads what real people posted in the last 30 days. Reddit threads with upvotes, YouTube videos with transcripts, Hacker News discussions. You give it a topic, it gives you signal.

b. Hermes is the execution layer. It runs last30days on a schedule, saves the output, sends it to your Telegram, and keeps doing it without you asking again.

c. Together: you stop guessing what your audience cares about and start seeing it — automatically, every week, before you write a word.

d. If you write a newsletter, use cases 1, 3, 4, and 10. Set two /cron jobs on Monday and Thursday. Your content brief arrives in Telegram. You write from real signal, not assumptions.

e. If you're doing a launch, use cases 2, 4, 6, and 7. Run them before you write a word of copy. You'll know what objections to address, what language your audience uses, and how they reacted to the last competitor who launched something similar.

f. If you're building content strategy, use cases 5, 6, 8, and 9. Understand what your audience recommends to each other, how they're using AI tools in your space, and what YouTube content is actually getting watched on your topic.

Start with one /cron job. See what shows up in Telegram on Monday morning. That's the fastest way to know if this is useful for you.

P.S. Credit to Corey Ganim for sharing the last30days skill in a recent session with the community members.

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Miscellaneous vibes

1. I managed $150 million+ in ads BEFORE AI. this is the stack I'd use today…

2. Gap spotted in a $150B market and how programmatic can fix this.

3. Business owners don't want to think about tokens, infrastructure, or credits. They want it to work…

4. These AI-powered cyber attacks are getting wild.

5. Someone is going to build the agentic auth layer ($20B industry)…

6. How to master Hermes agent?

7. The anatomy of ~/.hermes folder…

Let’s vibe

Crazy time to be building with AI. And, looks like Claude code is leading the game…

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