his post is basically a love letter to the Nous team, Peter Steinberg who got me into AI agents, AI in general, and of course you (my dear readers).

I have never talked about my past as openly as I am talking about it today. Only one year back I still worked full-time as an industrial mechanic in a factory. But let's start from the beginning.

I was really bad at school, so the only way to get an apprenticeship was to become a mechanic and start working in a factory. So I did. At first it was pretty good, I even liked it. But towards the end of my apprenticeship I started to feel that this was not what I envisioned for myself and not the job I wanted to do for the rest of my life or raise children with. I developed the deep desire to start my own business (probably a deep insecurity from childhood because I was always the weird kid, the kid that could not get what he wants for himself. I always needed help or somebody else. I also was far from the smartest). Now I believe that if you imagine a specific life for yourself and do not settle for anything else and work hard, you will reach it 100%. That is the faith I have in life.

So I started my own business on the side. Started selling merchandising products for a German car YouTuber. I sold around 15 clothing items over the span of around 8 months. But I had to close that because it did not work out and my partner was not on the same wavelength as me. Lost about 1500€ on that project. After that I tried selling websites because I always liked designing websites. I actually started doing that when I was around 15 years old. I even walked around in industrial areas throwing flyers of my web design business into post boxes. But all did not work.

One day I heard about OpenClaw and from the first minute I knew I needed to have that. I love tracking everything digitally. I have been wearing a Whoop for like a year, also been logging my meals in a food logging app. I even log every cent I spend, even calculate how much gas my car consumes on 100km (around 13L/100km or 18.09 US MPG). I love creating systems and logically working paths and workflows, so having my own AI assistant that would connect to all that information and give me scheduled updates was a no-brainer to me. I tried OpenClaw for a few weeks before switching to Hermes because of the reliability and the promise of it being more cost-efficient.

I had high hopes for my AI agent but let me tell you it completely shattered all expectations. I fucking fell in love with computers, computer systems, websites, AI coding, generating web applications, tinkering with computers and the agent.

This agent has given me the ability to run a YouTube channel, blog, Reddit account, sport, nutrition, business and many other hobbies and interests, all while also studying my first semester of business school. Even though I have never even visited the in Germany normally mandatory Gymnasium to be able to start a bachelor's degree.

What my agent manages for me:

• tracking nutrition, sport, mental health
• creating new blog posts out of Reddit posts or YouTube videos. I write the text, Hermes just creates a new post for it and manages the websites and even my VPS server
• generating asset pictures for videos or thumbnails
• being my infrastructure advisor about my Hermes agent, VPS, Mac mini and home network
• being my content creation advisor. He can download full Reddit posts, transcribe YouTube videos with comments and vote numbers, thereby he can tell me what topics are hot and what questions I received most
• he can give me insight into how much time I spend on learning for my exams, even detailed statistics about time I spent on the specific topic
• helps me while tinkering and playing around with my tech projects

I'm so thankful for this opportunity. My business is now even centered around Hermes. I literally earn money by doing what I love, tinkering with my Hermes agent, developing new and better ways to set up those agents. And all that on the shoulders of the Nous team, OpenClaw team, various AI teams, and not the least you (the reader).

With AI it is now possible to learn anything just by trying over and over again. I have no friends right now, we all split up one way or another. I'm currently alone with my girlfriend, but she's not really into the technical stuff. With AI and the community of Reddit and YouTube I can learn pretty much anything now. Lately I try to solve every computer problem by coding my way out of it. Something I'm really proud of, and something I have fun doing every day.

this post is basically a love letter to the Nous team, Peter Steinberg who got me into AI agents, AI in general, and of course you (my dear readers).

I have never talked about my past as openly as I am talking about it today. Only one year back I still worked full-time as an industrial mechanic in a factory. But let's start from the beginning.

I was really bad at school, so the only way to get an apprenticeship was to become a mechanic and start working in a factory. So I did. At first it was pretty good, I even liked it. But towards the end of my apprenticeship I started to feel that this was not what I envisioned for myself and not the job I wanted to do for the rest of my life or raise children with. I developed the deep desire to start my own business (probably a deep insecurity from childhood because I was always the weird kid, the kid that could not get what he wants for himself. I always needed help or somebody else. I also was far from the smartest). Now I believe that if you imagine a specific life for yourself and do not settle for anything else and work hard, you will reach it 100%. That is the faith I have in life.

So I started my own business on the side. Started selling merchandising products for a German car YouTuber. I sold around 15 clothing items over the span of around 8 months. But I had to close that because it did not work out and my partner was not on the same wavelength as me. Lost about 1500€ on that project. After that I tried selling websites because I always liked designing websites. I actually started doing that when I was around 15 years old. I even walked around in industrial areas throwing flyers of my web design business into post boxes. But all did not work.

One day I heard about OpenClaw and from the first minute I knew I needed to have that. I love tracking everything digitally. I have been wearing a Whoop for like a year, also been logging my meals in a food logging app. I even log every cent I spend, even calculate how much gas my car consumes on 100km (around 13L/100km or 18.09 US MPG). I love creating systems and logically working paths and workflows, so having my own AI assistant that would connect to all that information and give me scheduled updates was a no-brainer to me. I tried OpenClaw for a few weeks before switching to Hermes because of the reliability and the promise of it being more cost-efficient.

I had high hopes for my AI agent but let me tell you it completely shattered all expectations. I fucking fell in love with computers, computer systems, websites, AI coding, generating web applications, tinkering with computers and the agent.

This agent has given me the ability to run a YouTube channel, blog, Reddit account, sport, nutrition, business and many other hobbies and interests, all while also studying my first semester of business school. Even though I have never even visited the in Germany normally mandatory Gymnasium to be able to start a bachelor's degree.

What my agent manages for me:

• tracking nutrition, sport, mental health
• creating new blog posts out of Reddit posts or YouTube videos. I write the text, Hermes just creates a new post for it and manages the websites and even my VPS server
• generating asset pictures for videos or thumbnails
• being my infrastructure advisor about my Hermes agent, VPS, Mac mini and home network
• being my content creation advisor. He can download full Reddit posts, transcribe YouTube videos with comments and vote numbers, thereby he can tell me what topics are hot and what questions I received most
• he can give me insight into how much time I spend on learning for my exams, even detailed statistics about time I spent on the specific topic
• helps me while tinkering and playing around with my tech projects

I'm so thankful for this opportunity. My business is now even centered around Hermes. I literally earn money by doing what I love, tinkering with my Hermes agent, developing new and better ways to set up those agents. And all that on the shoulders of the Nous team, OpenClaw team, various AI teams, and not the least you (the reader).

With AI it is now possible to learn anything just by trying over and over again. I have no friends right now, we all split up one way or another. I'm currently alone with my girlfriend, but she's not really into the technical stuff. With AI and the community of Reddit and YouTube I can learn pretty much anything now. Lately I try to solve every computer problem by coding my way out of it. Something I'm really proud of, and something I have fun doing every day. Thank you Hermes for making this possible.

1. How much money do you spend monthly?

About 22 € a month for the AI itself. The reason it is this cheap: I buy DeepSeek V4 Flash directly from DeepSeek, not through a middleman. Flash-class models handle most agent work (classification, summaries, data extraction) without needing expensive reasoning models. My old answer to this question was around $17 a month, which I compared to OpenClaw pricing, and it still holds: the price stays low because most cron jobs do not need top-tier inference. After the price increase I will test the OpenCode Go subscription, and if I hit a limit I will fall back on the API credits I have sitting in several accounts. I have made a post and blog post about how to drastically lower costs. Some people write to me to this day and say it has saved them around 25% of cost.

2. What model do you use?

Almost exclusively DeepSeek V4 Flash, for everything except vision (vision runs through a separate model, mostly Google Gemini). For email categorisation I am using a local LLM, llama3.1:8b, running on my Mac Mini.

3. How are you getting your Apple Health data connected to your Hermes Agent?

The Health Bridge app on my iPhone writes directly to a Neon PostgreSQL database in the cloud, and my agent on the Mac Mini reads it with a simple query. No Shortcuts, no iCloud middleman, no manual exports. Just an app, a Postgres table, and a SELECT. That data feeds my daily health coach: steps, resting heart rate and WHOOP recovery get cross-referenced against my nutrition targets.

4. How many Hermes profiles are you using?

Five now: main, content, food log, therapist, and a minimal-text improver. Each profile has its own gateway, so each has its own chat frontend and its own context. That is a change: when I first showed my setup, everything ran under a single profile. The main profile is still the boss.

5. Do you run local inference? How do you keep Ollama running 24/7?

Yes. Ollama runs 24/7 on the Mac Mini as a launchd service, which means it starts automatically on boot and survives reboots. The Mini idles at about 15W, so the power cost is negligible, and I use TG Pro to control the fan curve because sustained local inference generates heat. Ollama is currently the local judge for my mail gatekeeper vibecoded project.

6. Do you have any guardrails in place or are you just raw dogging it?

Many. Hermes runs on a dedicated Mac Mini, and even there as a basic user, not admin. It has no direct access to anything where a mistake would be devastating, it is locked out of the SSD and HDD connected to the Mini, and it only has read access to my pre-categorised emails: there is no send endpoint anywhere in the system, so nothing can physically leave the machine. The mail system fails closed: if something goes wrong, it blocks rather than leaks. A watchdog reviews blocked emails every evening to catch false positives.

7. How is it backed up to iCloud?

There is a shared iCloud folder between my Apple account and the Hermes account. A daily cron at 7 AM compresses the entire Hermes configuration and copies it to iCloud automatically. I lost my whole setup three times before I built this, which is why I turned it into a free protocol anyone can follow: https://blog.holmebengt.com/post.html?id=backup-protocol

8. Have you installed it on your personal laptop or VPS?

No. My Hermes agent lives on its own Apple Mac Mini M4 (base model), a machine dedicated to exactly one job. My VPS at Hetzner only hosts the websites. Agent and websites are completely separated, and my personal laptop stays untouched by all of it.

I hope this helps someone.

I Locked My AI Agent Out of My Time Machine Backups

Got a Mac Mini running 24/7 for my Hermes agent and i wanted to also use it for Time Machine backups for the Mac Mini, my MacBook and my girlfriend's MacBook over the network. All on one 5 TB external drive. the 5TB hdd is connected to my Mac Mini!

Two users on the Mac Mini: my admin account, and a standard account with no admin rights where my AI agent lives. Full filesystem access. Read, write, delete.

Realized if that account ever gets compromised, my backups are gone too. Three Macs, nothing left.

So I locked the standard user out of every Time Machine volume.

i actually had to try this 3 times because all the things i tried did not work and locked Time Machine out of the files too.

But now the state is: Hermes cannot read, write, delete. Backups still work normally. Here's what I did.

How it works:

Every file on macOS has an owner and a group. Three permission levels: owner, group, everyone else.

External drives ignore this by default. Anyone can touch anything. Fine for USB sticks, bad for protected backups.

Set owner and group to: root:admin, permissions to 770.

root (Time Machine itself) can do anything

admin group (my admin account) can do anything

Everyone else (my agent account) gets nothing

That's the whole model. Three values.

Two things that didn't work

First: chmod -R on a sparsebundle kills it. Those bundles have hundreds of files with specific permissions. Blanket chmod -R overwrites everything and Time Machine rejects the bundle as corrupt. Lost two backups this way.

Second: macOS doesn't have a wheel group. That's Linux. On macOS it's admin. Took me a second attempt.

Local vs network backups

They're not the same thing:

USB direct: Time Machine runs as root. Permissions don't matter, root always wins.

Over SMB: Time Machine runs as whoever logged into the share. So my admin account needs write access through the group.

That's why root:admin 770 works. Root owns it, admin group gets group access, agent gets neither.

User / Access / Why

root / Read & Write / Owner

Admin account / Read & Write / In admin group

Agent account / Nothing / Not owner, not in group

SMB settings

macOS file sharing has two separate permission layers and both need to be right:

Filesystem (root:admin 770)

Share settings (System Settings → Sharing → File Sharing)

If share settings say "Everyone = Read Only" your agent walks right in over the network. Set Everyone to No Access.

After locking it down

I tested what the agent account can actually do. With full account compromise:

Can't read backups. ls on the volume returns "Permission denied."

Can't encrypt or delete. No write access to the sparsebundles.

Can't unmount the drive. SMB daemon blocks it.

Can't remount with noowners. Needs sudo.

The only remaining risks are getting my admin password or a kernel exploit. At that point backups are the least of your problems.

When this matters

Single user Mac? Don't bother. You're the admin.

Second account for guests, family, or an AI agent? Hour of work. Saves every backup you have.

Full step-by-step with copy-paste commands, screenshots, and edge cases on my blog:

https://blog.holmebengt.com/post.html?id=time-machine-isolation

I have realised that many of you guys are students, so I figured I would share what has helped me as a student.

If you don't know me yet:

I am Holme Bengt. I have been obsessed with starting a company for 4 years. Tried a lot of stuff, merch, web design, copywriting, and now AI agents and workflows. Last March I also started my first semester of business school or how we call it where I live, BWL Studium. I have never been a great student, I actually did not even go to college/ Gymnasium. I started my journey as an industrial mechanic milling large gears for industrial gearboxes. But I thought that can't be life, that can't be it. I want to start a company so bad that i read business books in the night shift next to my milling machine. since then i have been running a company on the side with various projects for 4 years.

Why am I telling you this? To give you an idea of my workload and that i am not the perfect student. and the stuff I have to get done day in and day out. And still I have enough time to do sports, watch movies with my GF, and do some repairs on my old Mercedes. All while being a bad student.

If these techniques have helped me to successfully pass my first semester this will work for all of you even better because realistically most of you are smarter and better learners than I am. I learned only the essentials.

here are all my tips on how to use AI in general and your Hermes / openclaw agent to help you as a student:

Tip 1:

Put all study materials, books, scripts, old exams into NotebookLM and let NotebookLM create a learning plan putting the emphasis on which topics were most used in the old exams, which are your teachers favourites. Try to learn the basics and the favourites of your teacher at the start of the semester.

Tip 2:

Use Hermes to create Anki flashcards. Don't get me wrong, I hate AI slop and please do yourself a favour and don't just give Hermes a huge chunk of material and tell him to handle it. You have to manually go through the material and think about what is truly useful and needed. But you can create a one time blueprint for your perfect Anki card and then use Hermes to effortlessly create a perfect Anki card in the exact same style and with the same explanations and format every time you need one. thats a huge time saver.

Tip 3:

I use Hermes to locally host a quiz website. Since Hermes in my case is running on its own Mac Mini connected to my other devices with Tailscale (free, VPN network between your devices) I can visit those local sites from all my devices and everywhere. I use this to spin up learning sites my Hermes agent creates for me, like an English grammar quiz asking me what tense I should use in this phrase or to fill in the right verb.

tip4: 

Using Hermes to give me an evening recap of my study time using the free app Toggl Track. It can also search my calendar and see how far the exam is out and if I am on track looking at my Notion learning plan and which topics I should grasp before the exam.

tip5: 

Using Hermes to save you time. My best example is using Hermes to set up a one time time saving automation. Every time I got a receipt I should log for my tax authority I had to manually save it and enter it into a Notion database for later export. Now I had Hermes whip up an automation which saves me 5 minutes every time I get a receipt.

here a quick cost advice for students:

The funny part: I pay about the same as a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, sometimes even less, but I have no rate limits. I spend about $22 a month.

I keep it cheap by using DeepSeek V4 Flash directly from DeepSeek (not OpenRouter), setting a 1300 character memory limit, cutting tool bloat in cron jobs, and telling Hermes to make itself cheaper. Each change saves 10-20%. Together they save a lot.

I wrote a full breakdown of how I reduced my cost from 40€ to 21€ on my blog here: https://blog.holmebengt.com/post.html?id=cost-optimization

I've been deep in Hermes and OpenClaw for a while now. And every time I got something working and set up a real complicated agent and it finally learns how to do that particular thing ... I'd eventually break it. Tweak a setting wrong, mess up the memory, overwrite a good config, have Open Claw or Hermes Break it self.

Start over from zero. or sit in the silence of youre dead telegram bot!

That happened three times. After the third redo I thought: why am I not backing this up?

So I hacked together a daily cron that tars my ~/.hermes/ into iCloud. Simple, worked great. Except my iCloud filled up fast because I was backing up 2 GB every day — mostly caches and node_modules I didn't need.

Today I finally built a real backup system that lives up to my agent. I've improved my setup so much since then, but I still relied on cleaning my iCloud folder manually because I was still using the old backup cron job from months ago.

That's when I realized: a "backup script" is easy. A good backup system is harder. You need to decide:

- Where should backups live? (iCloud, USB, server, Dropbox?)

- What actually needs backing up? (Config/memory/skills/cron — not caches/logs/node_modules)

- How often? (Daily? Weekly? Only before risky changes?)

- How many to keep? (5? 10? 30?)

- How to test that a backup actually works before you need it?

- How to restore when things go south?

I ended up writing a protocol, just a list of requirements that I give to my agent. It reads it, builds the script for my specific OS, sets up the cron, tests it, and documents what it did.

I made this backup protocol completely free and available for everyone to just download it. Here: https://blog.holmebengt.com/post.html?id=backup-protocol

The screenshots are from the tool showing how the setup process works.

How do you handle Hermes backups?

I hope you take something useful from this and maybe it's just a reminder to build a script that cleans out your backups for you. If you do decide to download my protocol, I'd feel honored to be a part of your Hermes setup.

Am I the only one who prefers coding with V4 Flash over V4 Pro? Flash is way faster and I can get more iterations in a shorter period of time, and the result is better after a few iterations with Flash than it is with one run of Pro. Also, because of the fast feedback loop, coding feels more rewarding, like driving a sports car compared to a grocery getter.

For really complex and heavy work, I'll switch to Pro. But for general coding and website building, I don't default to V4 Pro. I build with Flash first and wait until I run into a problem where I need more intelligence and reasoning.

Does anyone else do the same, or have anything to add to that?

note: running on a mac mini m4 16gb ram.

I get twenty plus emails a day. Newsletters, invoices, shipping confirmations, phishing attempts, client inquiries, server alerts. Most of it is noise. Some of it is critical. A small percentage is dangerous.

I wanted my Hermes agent to read my emails and draft replies. But I did not want Hermes to have access to everything. Specifically not 2FA codes, password resets, or banking notifications. If my agent ever got compromised, those should never be within reach.

Gmail filters check the sender, not the content. They can't tell the difference between a legitimate password notification from GitHub and a fake one from a phishing domain. And forwarding everything to a cloud AI means your password resets and 2FA codes end up in someone else's chat history. That was not an option. So everything runs locally.

The Core Idea: Two macOS Accounts

Hermes runs as a standard user. The email gatekeeper runs as an admin user. They communicate through a shared directory with read-only access. Hermes can read filtered summaries and create drafts. It can never access IMAP credentials, raw emails before filtering, or the .env file with passwords.

If Hermes ever got compromised, an attacker would find filtered summaries and the ability to search. But not the login credentials. Not the raw inbox. Not the 2FA emails. The separation is enforced by the operating system. No configuration can bypass it.

How It Works

Every 60 seconds, a Python script checks all mailboxes via IMAP. It grabs the newest unread emails. But here is the important part. It reads them with BODY.PEEK, which means they stay marked as unread in your inbox. Nothing changes on the server side.

First, every email goes through a data leak filter. Regex patterns catch passwords, IBANs, credit card numbers, and 2FA codes before anything else sees them. Those get redacted immediately.

Then the cleaned version goes to a local Ollama instance running llama3.1:8b. The model decides. Is this safe to forward? Is it spam? Is it a phishing attempt? It returns a verdict in strict JSON format.

If Ollama is down, every email gets blocked. If the model returns something unexpected, every email gets blocked. If the script crashes, a lock file prevents restarts for five minutes. Fail-closed, not fail-open. A false positive is annoying. A false negative is a data leak.

What Gets Through

Invoices, newsletters, server alerts, client inquiries, tracking updates, support tickets, appointment reminders, GitHub notifications, package deliveries. The ordinary noise of running a small business.

What Gets Blocked

Phishing attempts, password reset emails, 2FA codes, bank transfer notifications containing IBANs, emails applying pressure to act fast, requests to change email forwarding settings, logins from unknown devices. Anything that could be used against you if the system were compromised.

Supported Providers

Yahoo, Gmail, iCloud. I run all three through the same pipeline. The gatekeeper checks them in sequence, applies the same filters, sends the same verdict structure to the shared directory. Hermes never knows which mailbox an email came from. Only that it survived the filter.

What I Learned

Email gatekeeping needs to be paranoid by design. Not because someone is targeting you specifically. But because automation changes the risk profile. When you give an agent access to your inbox, the blast radius of a compromise is your entire digital life. The only way to sleep well is to architect that radius as small as possible before the agent ever sees a single email.

The two-account separation was the key insight. It costs nothing. macOS already supports it. It requires no additional infrastructure. And it is provably secure. You can test that user A genuinely cannot read files owned by user B. Everything else, the LLM judge, the regex filter, the fail-closed pipeline, is just implementation detail. The architecture is what makes it safe.

note: running on a mac mini m4 16gb ram.

Does anyone know why Mercedes chose to mark the 30-35 km/h and 50-60 km/h ranges orange? On the W210

Today I finished all my exams for my first semester of my Bachelor's and drove home on the autobahn no speed limit Mercedes W210.

I know my websites aren't AI slop. I have put in a lot of work and effort, but I still have the question: do these websites give off an AI slop vibe or a high-quality, well-built website vibe?

Also, if yes, what should I change?

Note: Please don't be respectful. Although I have built these with AI, it's not like these were spit out with one prompt. It was still a lot of effort.

I had to get rid of it — it didn't fit my lifestyle and I don't have time for it right now. But I really, really miss that bike.

I had to get rid of it — it didn't fit my lifestyle and I don't have time for it right now. But I really, really miss that bike.