Spinning up an AI employee: the Hermes agent stack playbook
Nine layers, one vendor each, and the 24-hour/7-day sequence that turns them into a $5k/month retainer. Hermes on an Orgo desktop, with its own email, phone, memory, vault and tool auth.
Nine layers, one vendor each, and the 24-hour/7-day sequence that turns them into a $5k/month retainer. Hermes on an Orgo desktop, with its own email, phone, memory, vault and tool auth.
What this skill does
A build-and-operate playbook for standing up a managed "AI employee" for a client business.
It answers the three questions that actually decide whether the engagement works: which vendor does which job (and why memory and knowledge base are not the same layer), what order to build in (agent live in 24 hours, one automation finished in 7 days), and how to find the automation worth building — the "what's your first itch?" intake, scored on lowest cost/effort/time against highest value.
The stack is Hermes Agent (Nous Research, open source) as the harness, an Orgo cloud desktop as the computer, AgentMail for email, AgentPhone for iMessage, Honcho for short-term memory, Obsidian as the knowledge base, Composio for tool auth, and Granola so the agent hears your client calls.
Ships two runnable scripts with no dependencies: a credential preflight that exits non-zero so it can gate a shell script, and a scaffolder that lays out a client engagement — Obsidian vault, env template, and a runbook with the SLA dates already filled in. 17 tests, standard library only.
Built from "He earns $5k building agents" (The Next New Thing, 19 Aug 2026) — an interview with Nick Vassilakis of Orgo. Every command and product claim was verified against the vendors' own documentation rather than transcribed from speech.
Get Spinning up an AI employee: the Hermes agent stack playbook
$20, one-time — drops into .claude/skills/.