How to run a (AI) life - with Hermes

Taking a sabbatical from the world of LinkedIn, where each post is a humble-brag, I want to go back to the roots. To the format that started it all. And write about what moves me, what makes my gears tick.

SO, I'm starting a series about how I use AI in my day-to-day life. Not the hype version. The version where I'm conversing with a computer at 6:30 in the morning, and it's telling me what's coming up, how I need to dress for the weather, and my daily Guru Granth Sahib Hukumnama.

The tool is called Hermes, an AI agent from Nous Research, and it lives on my Mac Server. It runs in the background, reads and writes my files, manages my calendar, notes, and reminders, and remembers things between conversations. In short, an assistant that never leaves the (home) office.

The part that changed everything is how I removed the friction between thought and execution. Enter VoiceInk - an app that lets me do voice-to-text with AI enhancement. Using a custom prompt and an internal dictionary, it distills my ramblings into coherent sentences, corrects misheard spellings, et voilà!

Under the hood, Hermes runs on the VERY capable and supremely cheap DeepSeek Flash v4 (July). That is the quiet linchpin of the whole setup. Flash is fast and cheap, so I can dispatch small requests at it all day without watching the clock or the ledger. Voice in, fast answer out. Hermes is smart enough to understand what needs to be committed to memory versus what is idle banter.

And what am I using it for? From general thinking-out-loud partner in tech, transcribing/translating Punjabi Gurmukhi text to English, to transcribing and cleansing journal entries from 30 years ago... the correct question to ask would be: what am I not using it for?

What I really want to say is that I have been searching for a harness that grows with me and my needs, and in Hermes I found one.

More as I feel like it.