What your agent actually does: four real things I use it for

By now you have Hermes installed and a model connected. If your experience is anything like mine, the first thing you feel after that is a mild “and now what?” The interface is open, the agent is ready, and it’s not obvious what to actually ask it. This article is the answer to that feeling — four things I genuinely use my agent for, with the exact words I typed and what happened next.

Some of these happen multiple times a week. Troubleshooting comes up whenever something breaks. Reminders I set constantly. The HTPC research was a one-time thing — but the result was concrete enough that I actually built it, which is the point. None of these are demos. These are real sessions.

1. Summarise a YouTube video

I watch a lot of technical content — talks, tutorials, product reviews. More than I have time to actually watch. The workflow I use now: paste the URL into the chat, type “summarize”, and read the result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Summarize this video

Hermes picks up the URL, calls its YouTube skill, pulls the transcript, and returns a structured summary — main points, key takeaways, timestamp references if the video is long. The whole thing takes a few seconds. I decide in two minutes whether the full video is worth an hour of my time, or whether the summary told me everything I needed.

What’s happening under the hood: Hermes ships with a YouTube skill that knows how to extract transcripts. You don’t configure it — it’s just there. This is the first time most people notice that the agent isn’t just answering questions; it’s going out and getting things.

2. Research a purchase — and actually use the result

I wanted to build a cheap media centre PC. Specifically: something that could play 4K video, had HDMI output, would run Windows 11, and needed at least 8GB of RAM. New or second-hand, as long as it was cheap. I typed almost exactly that:

I'm looking for an HTPC — cheap, needs to play 4K video, HDMI output, must run Windows 11, minimum 8GB RAM. Search for new and second-hand options and give me a comparison.

Hermes ran several searches, pulled specs from product pages and second-hand listings, and came back with a comparison — models, prices, what each one handled well, what to watch out for. It flagged which second-hand options would need a RAM upgrade to hit 8GB and which integrated graphics chips actually handle 4K H.265 without dropping frames.

I picked one of the options it surfaced, ordered it, and built it out. The result is a working HTPC running Kodi and every streaming app I use, connected to my projector. If you want the full build walkthrough — the exact model, the storage setup, the Kodi configuration — I wrote it up: Build a budget media center PC for under $100.

The point of including this here is not the HTPC. It’s that the agent’s output was actually useful enough to act on. That’s the bar I care about.

3. Fix a problem on my PC

Ollama — the local model runner I use for some offline work — had stopped accepting updates. The usual update command did nothing. I didn’t want to spend twenty minutes reading GitHub issues, so I asked Hermes instead:

Ollama won't update. Can you look into why and fix it?

Hermes identified the problem: a running Ollama process was locking the installation directory, blocking the update from writing new files. Before I could do anything, it stopped the relevant background processes. Then it found the current installer for my Windows version, checked it against the release page to confirm it was the right build, and dropped the download link in the chat.

My job: one click to download, one click to install. Hermes had already cleared the way. The whole thing took less time than it would have taken me to find the Ollama GitHub releases page.

This is the pattern I’ve come to rely on for PC problems: describe the symptom in plain language, let the agent diagnose it, do the thing it hands back. It’s not magic — Hermes used the web search tool to look up the error, and the terminal tool to stop the processes. But those are exactly the steps I would have taken manually, just faster and without the context-switching.

4. Remember something and tell me when it matters

This one is almost embarrassingly simple, but it’s the one I use most often for low-stakes reminders:

Remember that my library books are due back in 3 weeks. Remind me when the time comes.

Two things happen from that one sentence. Hermes stores the fact in its persistent memory — so it knows about the books. And it sets a scheduled job that fires in three weeks and sends me a message. I don’t think about it again until the reminder arrives.

What makes this worth mentioning: before I had this setup, I would have opened a calendar app, created an event, set a reminder, and closed the app. Now I say it once, in plain English, while I’m already in the chat. The agent handles both the memory and the timing. For anything with a deadline — a follow-up, a renewal, a “check on this in a month” — this is now my default.

The reminder delivery goes to Telegram once that’s connected. If you haven’t set that up yet, the agent can still log the reminder locally — it just won’t push it to your phone. Setting up the Telegram gateway is covered later in the series.

The pattern behind all four

Looking at these four together, they share something: in each case, I described what I wanted in plain language and the agent figured out the steps. I didn’t specify which tool to use, which search query to run, or which process to stop. That’s the shift from chatbot to agent — the agent reasons about what needs to happen and acts on it, rather than just answering.

None of these required any configuration beyond what you’ve already done. No extra skills to install, no special setup. They work because Hermes ships with a useful set of tools and knows how to reach for the right one. The articles that follow in this series add more capabilities on top — memory, a knowledge base, custom tools — but these four work right now, with what you already have.

Try one today. The YouTube summary is the easiest starting point — paste a video you’ve been meaning to watch and see what comes back. This article is part of the Agentic AI series. The next article covers the foundation that makes everything more reliable as you start building on top of it.