Building autonomous agents on Hermes: planning, cron and resume

How do people outside AR Labs build autonomous and semi-autonomous agents on Nous Research's Hermes agent harness, and in particular how do those agents plan their own work, run it over many sessions and pick up where they left off? We researched that question in November 2026. A harness is everything around the model that shapes what an agent does: the agent program, its instructions, skills, hooks, tools and checks. The report reviews ten public builds and tutorials from videos, write-ups and repositories, alongside the official Hermes documentation, and separates what presenters showed working from what they only asserted.

The research was an input to the planning and execution loop of the marketing manager agent in our multi-agent system, which runs on Hermes; the companion report on the agent planning and execution loop carries that design further. Hermes mechanisms themselves (Kanban and its dispatcher, /goal and its judge, cron, delegate_task, skills, memory, session search) were described and checked against the Hermes code in an earlier review, and this report draws on that review rather than repeating it.

Video transcripts were downloaded as automatic captions and treated as untrusted data. Where this document says a result is demonstrated, the presenter showed it working on screen or in a published artefact. Where it says claimed, the presenter or author asserted it without showing it. Automatic captions garble some words, so short quotes below are paraphrased where the caption is unclear.

Finding

No public build found here gives an agent a written plan that it revises week by week and resumes from across sessions. The builds that run for a long time do so by scheduling fresh sessions with self-contained prompts (cron), or by putting each unit of work on a task board that a dispatcher starts and records (Kanban). Planning, where it exists, is a one-off step before execution: the agent writes a plan or a task graph, a human looks at it, and then it runs.

Three patterns recur in the builds that work. First, a human approval gate sits in Telegram, with replies such as approve, shelve or a modified plan, and every builder of a public-facing agent keeps it. Second, every scheduled run starts with no memory, so the resume point has to be in a file or a task record that the run's prompt names explicitly. Third, the reliable builds are narrow: a fixed daily pipeline, a bounded goal with a checkable finish, or a scheduled report.

The two strongest reports of failure concern the more ambitious machinery. One tester could not get the chat agent to use Kanban at all, even when told to repeatedly. Another found /goal fast but less controllable than a loop with an editable written plan, because its internal plan is not visible to the human.

For a single-owner agent such as a marketing manager, the patterns that fit first are the ones that need no new machinery: a plan the agent writes into its own files and the owner approves in Telegram, a weekly planning conversation done by hand, a resume point in a state file named at the start of every session, and /goal used occasionally for one bounded deliverable. Cron-scheduled planning and reports fit once the by-hand version has been done enough times to know what the prompt should say. Kanban pipelines, orchestrator profiles and a Linear link solve problems a single-owner agent does not yet have.

1. Builds found

Tonbi's AI Garage: Keepsake Threads marketing workflow (30 October 2026)

Who and what. Tonbi, who runs the AI Garage YouTube channel, published I Built the Ultimate Marketing Workflow in Hermes Agent three days before this research. The video description says a Hermes agent runs Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram for Keepsake Threads, a small product site, "while I stay in control of the campaign and its budget". The chapters list approved ad creative, "a restricted write gateway", site tracking, safeguards, daily and weekly Telegram reports, email follow-up with "bounded changes", a Campaign Intelligence dashboard, and revising the ads and landing page from early data "before approving a restart".

The loop. From the description: scheduled workflows produce daily and weekly reports in Telegram; the agent proposes changes; the owner approves before a campaign restarts. The companion repository tonbistudio/hermes-marketing-dashboard is a read-only dashboard plugin. It reads a "marketing package" folder: policy.yaml, daily run results in runs/meta-daily/*.json, run logs in runs/*/log.md, approval packets in packets/*/manifest.json, the owner's recorded decisions in decisions.json, and monthly economics in economics/YYYY-MM.yaml. Its README says "It never changes anything. It reads files and draws them", and that whatever runs the marketing (a scheduled agent, a script or a person) refreshes the snapshot after each run. It shows packets waiting for the owner and the owner's decisions, spend against a lifetime cap, and days with missing data marked as missing rather than zero.

Demonstrated versus claimed. The repository and its file layout are real (2 commits, 15 stars when read). The transcript could not be downloaded (YouTube rate-limited the caption requests), so the running behaviour, the write gateway and the campaign results were not checked. The description says a general open-source plugin and a "marketer profile" sold through Agent Wikis Pro are planned; the scheduling logic is in that paid profile, not in the public repository.

Why it matters. This is the closest public analogue to an AI marketing-manager agent: a single business function, a single owner who approves, and records kept as files in a package the agent writes and the owner can read. Its approval model is a folder of decision packets plus a decisions file, not a task board.

Tonbi's AI Garage: Kanban multi-agent workflow (1 June 2026)

The loop is recorded here from the sozai.app transcript page of the video. Scout profiles on cron write markdown reports. An orchestrator removes anything it has seen before, scores each candidate, shelves those under 65 out of 100, and creates downstream cards. The dispatcher starts each card once its parents are done. The single human gate is in Telegram, where Tonbi replies "approve", "shelve" with a reason, or a modified plan; he calls this gate "very important". Demonstrated: about 18 workers in parallel, one run finishing 97 tasks, the orchestrator noticing that deliverables pointed at deleted scratch workspaces and regenerating them. Reported failures: outputs written to scratch workspaces that "are no longer present", and an hourly cron cadence he later said "probably doesn't need to be hourly".

Tonbi's AI Garage: Hermes masterclass, cron and automation (19 June 2026)

Hermes Agent Masterclass: 7. Cron & Automation is a teaching video, not a business build, but it states the operating rules for scheduled sessions most clearly. Demonstrated: creating a job from Telegram in plain language; a second job that uses the first job's output (context_from) to produce a 9am Telegram report; a script-only job (no_agent) that pays nothing for the model and stays silent unless memory is above 85%; a job polling for bug reports every two minutes that replies only "silent" when a report does not hold up, and otherwise sends a triage report and a proposed fix plan with the instruction "Do not change any code" so Tonbi can reply "go fix it". Stated rule: "every run starts from zero", so a prompt such as "check on that server issue" fails and a prompt must carry every instruction it needs. The dashboard offers blueprints for a morning briefing and a weekly review.

Superbash (BoxminingAI): /goal guide (11 May 2026)

Hermes Agent /goal Guide: Use it like THIS!. The presenter builds a browser game. The loop: create a project folder; talk the idea through with the agent and tell it to "plan first, do not build yet" (or use /plan); have the agent write an AGENTS.md in the folder recording the plan; then start /goal build the game according to the plan. Demonstrated: without a plan the first build was poor; after a 14-minute research-and-plan step that produced seven architectural decisions, the goal run finished in one judged turn with a working, plain game. Reported failures: the agent invented a /goal sub command, apparently confusing goals with Kanban's parent and child links. He also runs a cron-plus-Kanban workflow and says there is "no native synergy between cron jobs and Kanban", so he wrote his own deduplication step, which a new session sometimes mishandles. His advice: do not use /goal for brainstorming, for work you want to approve step by step, or for deploying to production.

Nemanja Mirkovic: /goal versus a Ralph loop (18 May 2026)

I Was Wrong About Hermes Agent /goal. A Ralph loop is a script that repeats an agent run, each time reading the previous run's record, until an exit check passes. His version writes a product requirements document and turns it into GitHub issues, which the loop works through. Demonstrated: the same app built both ways with the same model; /goal finished first with an app whose cards could not be moved; the Ralph loop took about an hour and produced an app whose features worked. His conclusions: the /goal judge "is not a code reviewer... just a simple yes or no check"; the Ralph loop gives more control because "I can check the PRD, I can edit the PRD... I can stop it, I can resume it"; he uses Kanban for non-code work such as content production with human steps (research, script, posts, images). He reports a /goal migration that went through seven context compressions and still finished cleanly.

AI Automation channel: Kanban test (6 May 2026)

I Tested Hermes Agent Kanban So You Don't Have To (It's Broken). Demonstrated failure: over about three hours, with free OpenRouter models, the chat agent would not put a project onto the Kanban board even when told explicitly and repeatedly. It created boards it never used and reported tasks it had not created. Cards cannot be created by hand in the dashboard; work must go through the agent. Version and model choice are confounds: Kanban has been revised often since May, and the models used were free ones.

Tertiary Infotech: daily AI news video team

Hermes Agent Kanban Daily AI Video Team, a Singapore training company's write-up of its own pipeline. Four profiles (researcher, scriptwriter, video generator, publisher). A cron job creates the day's first card with an idempotency key (a unique label that stops a retried or double-fired job creating a second card); the next three cards are created up front, each waiting on the one before. Handoffs travel in card comments. A render that fails twice blocks the card and a person unblocks it; the post calls this "the only human touchpoint". The publisher refuses to publish if script facts do not trace to the researcher's sources. They replaced a single-agent loop because quality fell by the upload step and a 2am render failure forced a restart from ideation. Mostly claimed: no run logs or rates; "a handful" of blocked cards per month; the post is also a sales page.

Vivek Shetye: topic research with bot mode and Kanban

Hermes Agent Bot Mode vs Kanban and a companion video. A cron job starts a news scout; an orchestrator turns a candidate topic into Kanban tasks for specialist profiles (source checker, audience researcher, competition researcher, angle editor), and a synthesis task produces a video recommendation. Demonstrated: one run producing one recommendation. Not shown: recovery, repeat operation, any human review step.

Julian Goldie: content automation over Telegram (2 April 2026)

A livestream titled HERMES OC. Scheduled jobs read two subreddits for news, draft posts with images, and post to X; others produce daily X analytics. Practice he states: approve every post before it goes out, because otherwise posts are "irrelevant or it repeats itself"; "be prepared for the first seven days", it "won't do anything perfectly"; feedback accumulates in skill files so the drafts improve. He keeps a second Hermes in a terminal to repair the Telegram one when it breaks. Demonstrated: a post on X written and published by the agent. Claimed: steady improvement through feedback.

Nate Herk: personal assistant course (10 May 2026)

Hermes Agent: Zero to Personal AI Assistant. Relevant for two points. He treats the agent as waking up stateless "like Memento", so the files loaded at session start are what it knows. Demonstrated: a cron job that runs hourly, checks local time, and at midnight mirrors the assistant's state into a git repository. He does not use Kanban: useful for multi-agent coding, "not too useful for me" as an on-the-go assistant.

Other sources consulted

The official Kanban docs and goals docs; the bundled kanban-orchestrator skill (read on a mirror site); GitHub issue #19931, which established the review-required convention for Kanban, closed 11 May 2026; RFC #16102, which a search summary says records the dispatcher moving from a cron-driven design to a long-running daemon (not read directly); and the community list awesome-hermes-usecases (search summary only).

2. Planning-loop patterns on Hermes

A plan the agent writes and revises

Every source treats planning as a step before execution, not a standing document. Superbash has the agent plan without building, record the plan in a project AGENTS.md, and then hand the plan to /goal. Mirkovic has the agent write a requirements document and issues that the human can read, edit, stop and resume, and prefers this to /goal precisely because the plan is visible. The kanban-orchestrator skill tells the orchestrator to "sketch the task graph and show it to the user before creating cards", then report the plan in plain prose. Hermes /goal draft has the agent draft a completion contract (outcome, verification, constraints, boundaries, and when to stop and ask) for the human to review before the loop starts. Tonbi's Keepsake Threads build is the only one in which the agent revises a live plan from results, and there the revision goes back to the owner for approval before the campaign restarts.

No source shows an agent keeping one plan file that it revises across weeks. Kanban comments and the issue tracker in a Ralph loop come closest: both are durable records that the next run reads.

Choosing the next task

On Kanban, the dispatcher chooses: a card becomes ready when its parents are done, and ready cards start in priority order, limited per profile (official docs). Above the board, the choice is made by an orchestrator, sometimes with a scoring threshold (Tonbi's 65 out of 100). On cron, the schedule chooses: each job is a fixed piece of work at a fixed time. In conversation, the human chooses. None of the builds has an agent pick its own next task from a backlog by judging against goals; the closest is Tonbi's orchestrator scoring candidates and shelving the weak ones, and those choices still pass his approval.

Human approval gates

Five forms appear. A Telegram reply of approve, shelve or modify, used by Tonbi in both builds. A draft for approval before anything is posted (Goldie). A Kanban card that blocks itself, receives a human comment and is unblocked, which the official docs list as pattern P5 "Human-in-the-loop"; the docs also offer a review status, with a reviewer able to approve or send work back, and the setting review_dispatch: false for boards where only humans review. The stop_when field of a /goal completion contract. And an approval record kept as files: Tonbi's decision packets and decisions.json. One caution holds across all five: Hermes enforces none of these on outward actions; they work because the agent is told to wait, or because the tools that act are restricted, as Tonbi's "restricted write gateway" claims to do.

Recovering after restart

Cron sessions start with no memory of earlier runs, so builders put everything in the prompt (Tonbi's rule) or chain jobs with context_from. Kanban reclaims crashed workers and puts the card back to ready; the run's progress is lost, but the comment thread, which the next worker reads, survives (official docs). A /goal survives /resume and compression but, according to the earlier review of the Hermes code, not a Telegram /new, and probably waits for the next message after a gateway restart. The builders who keep state across sessions do it with files: Nate Herk mirrors state into git; Tonbi's package holds run logs and decisions; Superbash keeps each project in its own folder with an AGENTS.md "because when you enter a new session with your agent, they don't know which files to reference". Tertiary Infotech's reason for moving to Kanban was that a failed step in a single long loop meant starting again from the beginning.

Daily and weekly cadences

Morning briefings and weekly reviews are standard cron blueprints in the Hermes dashboard (Tonbi masterclass). Tonbi's marketing build sends daily and weekly Telegram reports. Two operating details recur: reply "silent" when there is nothing worth sending, so a quiet run does not interrupt the owner; and use script-only jobs for checks whose output is fixed, so no model is paid for. The official Kanban docs describe pattern P4, "Long-running journal: same profile + shared dir + cron", for a record built up over weeks. A cron job can create a Kanban card each day with an idempotency key so a retry does not duplicate work (Tertiary Infotech; official docs). No source shows a cron job that runs a planning session in which the agent revises its own priorities.

Kanban with an external tracker such as Linear

There is no built-in sync. Hermes reaches Linear through an MCP server, which makes Linear a set of tools inside a run. Third-party guides (neura.market, hermes-agent.ai) recommend Kanban for agent execution and Linear as the tracker people see; neither was verified. Mirkovic uses GitHub issues as the plan a loop works through, which is the same split. Community projects bridge Kanban to other boards, including an Obsidian bridge. No source reported running Kanban and an external tracker side by side for long, or how they kept the two consistent.

3. Implications

The evidence above bears on a particular shape of agent: one Hermes profile, one owner who approves, a written record of goals and decisions, and a state file whose current-work section is the resume point.

Fits now, with no new machinery.

• A plan the agent writes into its own records and the owner approves in Telegram with approve, shelve or modify. This is Tonbi's gate and the orchestrator skill's "show the plan before creating work", with the agent's own records in place of a board.
• Plan first, then execute. Superbash's sequence (talk it through, record the plan, then run) is how a weekly planning conversation can work by hand.
• A resume point in a file that every session reads first. Every builder who runs across sessions does this, and it depends on the agent's workspace instructions loading at the start of every session, on every interface.
• Approval records as files. Tonbi's decision packets and decisions.json are a working model of decision records, and the dashboard plugin's read-only design (it never changes anything) is a useful model for whatever view shows the owner the plan.
• /goal for an occasional bounded deliverable with a clear finish, using /goal draft so the owner sees the completion contract first. Both /goal reviewers say not to use it where step-by-step approval is wanted.

Fits after the by-hand version has been repeated. A weekly planning prompt and a daily or weekly report on cron. Each cron session starts from nothing, so the prompt must name the workspace (workdir), the state file and the agent's records, and say what to do when there is nothing to report ("silent"). Writing that prompt depends on knowing what a good by-hand planning session contains, which only repetition shows.

Needs machinery a single-owner agent should not build yet. Kanban pipelines across several profiles, an orchestrator that decomposes work, cron creating cards with idempotency keys, review lanes, a Linear or other tracker link, and bot-mode teams. Each solves coordination between many workers or many people, and a single-owner agent has neither. A single-profile Kanban queue would also give the agent a second record of tasks beside its own records, which conflicts with keeping one authoritative record; Kanban holds execution state, not goals or evidence. The May test in which the agent would not use Kanban when told is a further reason to wait, though later versions may behave better.

Gaps

• Transcripts for three relevant videos could not be downloaded because YouTube rate-limited caption requests: Tonbi's Keepsake Threads marketing workflow (only its description and repository were read), Wanderloots' Subagents vs Agent Teams: Hermes Bots, Goal Loops & Kanban Graphs, and Matt Penny's How To Automate 90% of Your Marketing With Hermes Agent. The Tonbi marketing transcript is the most valuable of these, for how his approval packets and restricted write gateway work in practice.
• No r/hermesagent or X threads were read directly; Reddit and X content reached this document only through search summaries, which are not cited as evidence.
• No public build was found in which an agent keeps and revises its own multi-week plan. That part of an agent's loop has no Hermes precedent here and rests on the general planning literature, covered in the companion report on the planning and execution loop.
• The Linear pattern rests on third-party guides that were not verified.