After OpenClaw failed him, one user built a full automation pipeline with Hermes
The writer, an electrical engineer who dislikes web programming, hand-built a fantasy football site with HTML 15 years ago and hated the experience so much it kept killing his side-project ideas afterward. To offload the tedious parts, he first tried on a cheap VPS, but it crashed constantly and he spent a month essentially babysitting it around the clock before nearly giving up. As a last attempt, he tried Hermes on the same $5 VPS after reading it was built for rather than chat reach, starting with the task he hated most: writing captions for a print- side hustle.
It worked, so he kept adding more steps. Now his agent, named Johnny5, pulls weekly trend data from Etsy and Amazon, feeds promising directions into an image-generation AI, and hands off to his own custom tooling for the rest of the pipeline.
Key points
- crashed repeatedly on a $5 VPS over a month before the writer switched to Hermes
- Hermes was chosen specifically because it was described as built for
- started with the most tedious task ( captions) before expanding
- The pipeline now pulls weekly Etsy/Amazon trend data, feeds an image AI, then runs custom tooling
- Starting with one small task and adding steps incrementally is presented as the practical path