Welcome
What you will be able to do, how the course is ordered, and how to work through each lesson.
Clear outputs
You are going to set up Hermes ↗, a state-of-the-art AI agent, on your own machine — free, with a screenshot for every step. Here is what you can do at the end of each part. Privacy note: free cloud models can send your prompts and page context to the provider, so the content leaves your machine.
| When | What you can do |
|---|---|
| After Part I | Talk to your own agent, in a personality you picked, from your desktop or your phone — and put it to work on something real: scrubbing your name off data-broker sites, or learning a book you hand it. |
| After Part II | Give it a memory that survives next week, point it at your own notes so it answers from what you wrote, set rules for what it may do unsupervised, and leave it running jobs on a schedule while you are away. |
Part I
Part I · Working assistant
- Words
- Install
- Behaviour
- Messages
- File receipt
Lessons 00–06
Part II
Part II · Memory & routines
- Remember
- Notes
- Rules
- Scheduled job
- Backup
Lessons 07–12
What this course is (and is not)
- Is: a free, guided setup — plus the handful of words that make the screens make sense
- Is: real results on disk, not just clever chat
- Is not: a coding bootcamp — we stay on Hermes, and you write no code
- Is not: a green light to run a tool-using agent on the laptop that holds your banking and work logins
- Cloud models send your conversation to the model provider. Privacy note: free cloud models can send your prompts and page context to the provider, so the content leaves your machine.
How to follow
- Do lessons in order. Each ends with a short “you are done when” check.
- Do not skip 01 unless you can already explain agent vs chat, harness vs runtime, and Think → Act → Observe (the printable glossary helps).
- Pick your host in lesson 02 before install (dedicated machine preferred).
- Optional labs exist after Part I for extra drills — not required to finish the main path.
- Next: lesson 01 — The AI Cheat Sheet (stack, loop, messages, then the rest).
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