Hermes Household AI

What this is

I run a household of four and a dog, and the load is not the big things — it is the small ones. Appointment times. School notices. Forms with deadlines. Deliveries. The weekly shop. A prescription that needs chasing. None of it is hard. All of it is constant, and all of it slips.

So I built an agent that handles it. It runs on a small computer at home, has its own identity, and the household talks to it in a normal messaging thread. It reads my email, keeps the family calendar true, tracks what is in flight, and tells me what changed overnight.

This is the blueprint. Not the source code — the decisions, the order I did them in, and the mistakes. It is written for someone technically curious but not an engineer, and it is written to be followed, step by step, in ten steps.

Ten steps	From a blank computer to a working household agent
Roughly a weekend	To get it answering. Months to get it good
No cloud application	It runs on a machine you own
One non-negotiable	It never acts as you. It drafts, you send

What it does

Not a feature list. The actual work, and what it needs underneath.

The work	How it reaches me	What it needs
Reads my email and turns the actionable parts into tasks	A task appears, or a morning summary	Its own mailbox, read access
Handles school notices — dates onto the calendar, reminders created	A short daily digest	Its own mailbox, calendar write
Keeps the family calendar true and flags clashes	A message, before it becomes a problem	Calendar read and write
Chases things in flight — deliveries, bookings, forms, fares	A message when something changes	Its own mailbox, scheduled jobs
Builds the weekly grocery list, and fills the online cart for me to confirm	A list I review, a cart I check out	A shared list, a browser
Watches recurring purchases and tells me when to reorder	A message on the right day	Purchase history, a scheduled job
Runs the logistics of an upcoming trip	Itinerary, costs, tasks, reminders	Email, calendar, a task list
Prepares forms and replies for me	A draft in my mailbox	Draft permission only
Reports the day before I wake up	One summary at 5am	Everything above

The ten steps

I dug into the order because the order is the part nobody writes down. You cannot set permissions before you have an identity. You cannot connect tools before you have a machine.

#	Step	Part
1	Name it, and give it a voice	An Identity
2	Create accounts that belong to it, not to you	An Identity
3	Set up the computer it lives on	A Machine
4	Connect calendars, reminders and contacts	Its Tools
5	Connect email and tasks	Its Tools
6	Set the permission layers	Permissions
7	Write the job description	The Job
8	Connect the channels the household uses	Conversation
9	Give it memory — and a wiki you can read	Memory
10	Set up backups and watchdogs	Honesty

Two things worth knowing up front

The last ten percent takes eighty percent of the time. Getting an agent to answer a question is a weekend. Getting it to behave well around a real family — not too talkative, correct about the details that matter — takes months of tuning. Plan for that, because it is the actual project.

What it cannot do matters more than what it can. Mine can never send email as me, never spend money, never invent a fact about my household, and never reach outside its own lane. Those four rules are in The Rules It Cannot Break, and they are why I am comfortable leaving it running.

Start here

What You Need First lists everything to gather before you begin. Then follow The Build Order.