I run an personal AI agent locally (hermes), and use a combination of local models and whatever model I can get for a reasonable price (usually deepseek). After using it for a couple months, I'm converted. They're so good, the more you use it, the more useful it is; you internalise more of what it could be used for. It runs so many boring parts of my life, leaving me with more time to spend with my family. I liken it to release of the first iPhone; it didn't invent any new technology, but packaged different bits of tech together in a way that was consumer friendly. I think we'll look back at OpenClaw/Hermes/Muse/Instinct in the same way. I do worry about using purely cloud based offerings like Muse, I reckon there is a market for someone to package an consumer AI agent that lives on your home network.

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tills13 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

ok but what are the legitimate use cases you have for this? We were promised something similar with Google Home et al but they are glorified light switches and timers in my home. I run a homelab, I have technical ambitions, but I cannot think of a single thing in my life that I would rather talk to a local AI about than just do it myself or sit down and prompt Claude manually for.

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sksksk 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's fair, I'll give a couple of example of things that I've used it for...

I built an app (in codex), that goes through my emails, pulls out any receipts, and adds the purchases to a sqlite database.

I do all my grocery shopping online (through my supermarket), so our weekly shop is stored in the database.

Hermes uses that to predict what items will need restocking (based on how often I buy it, and when I last bought it).

Every week, it logs into the supermarket website on my behalf, books a delivery slot, and adds all the items that need restocking to the shop.

Throughout the week, if I run out of something, I take a photo of the barcode and send it to hermes, it adds it to the shop for me.

I built a similar app for travel; if I have any upcoming travel, hermes will send me updates (delays, platform changes etc...).

I do a lot of train travel for work, if my train is delayed, it will automatically apply for the compensation on my behalf.

It reads my emails, and pulls any actionable items out, and adds it to an Asana list. I can either do the tasks myself, or assign it to Hermes and it will do it for me.

As an example, I had an task to book swimming lessons for my son, hermes monitors the swimming lesson availability and automatically booked it when a suitable one becomes available.

Shopping is a good use case, I have a clock that needed a new battery, it wasn't a standard battery, and required a screwdriver to open the compartment. I took a photo of the clock, sent it to hermes, and it found out what battery took and ordered it of Amazon for me.

I wanted to buy some smart thermostats for our radiators, but wanted to be compatiable with our current smart heating system. Hermes is connected to my home assistant, so it figured out what heating system we have and found a compatiable set of eBay (this is slightly more involved than it sounds, as there is a new version of the heating system with a new set of completely incompatiable accesories).

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oa335 an hour ago | parent [-]

> I took a photo of the clock, sent it to hermes,

How precisely do you do this? I'm interested in setting up a similar system, and I keep getting tripped up on how best to share information with the agent in a way that doesn't compromise security but is still easy to use.

	▲	refreeze654 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Tailscale on a phone, on a server, and then whatever you and your agent come up with. I had a web app I built to talk to it. One day I wanted to share files and I just told it to implement that feature. I don't use much off the shelf anymore. It's too easy to make my own hyper customized versions.

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BeetleB an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> We were promised something similar with Google Home et al but they are glorified light switches and timers in my home.

If only :-(

Ever since I switched them to Gemini, they're just crazy unreliable. For example, I have a routine to control multiple light switches at once. On some days, it happily executes the routine. In the remaining (about 50%) days, it says "I'm sorry - there is no routine called X. Would you like to run routine Y instead?" Why it can find routine Y but not X is beyond me.

So no, it can't even control smart devices any more.

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randito 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What are you doing to avoid sending your personal info to non-trusted "whatever models?" I wouldn't trust some of the cheaper models to have zero data retention, etc.

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dlisboa 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can you give some ideas of what you use it for? I'm amenable to the idea of automating some things I just don't know what I'm missing. Or using it for things I never thought of before.

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sweetjuly an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How are you combining local models with hosted models? I have tried OpenClaw with some of the smaller local models (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next) and found that while it can sometimes complete tasks, it would face plant often enough that it made it impossible to use. Do you have some tiered system where the hosted models dispatch to local models?

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BeetleB an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

A write-up would be nice.

I tried OpenClaw in Jan/Feb, and while I saw the promise, in practice it kept breaking. Wasn't worth my time.

Have things improved much since then? Assuming I'll only use a cheap API model (no local)?