Spent half a day on repetitive tasks over the weekend and suddenly realized my AI automation stack has been running smoothly for nearly half a year, and the efficiency boost is pretty noticeable. So, I figured I'd summarize how this architecture collaborates.
There are basically two core roles: **Hermes does the planning**, and Claude Code handles the craftsmanship. Hermes is essentially a task manager, dealing with scheduling, memory management, background cron jobs, plus messaging distribution to Telegram and Feishu. Think of it as a secretary that's always online, remembering yesterday's ideas, reminding me on time tonight, and automatically running a data collection script tomorrow.
The really complex coding tasks, I hand over to Claude Code to nail in one go. Major refactoring, code audits, or designing a feature from 0 to 1—these are all done thoroughly using Claude Code's CLI mode. Both sides can access my skill library (methodology accumulation), and if Hermes wants to reuse some existing logic, it just calls the skill; Claude Code can use it too, with almost no switching costs.
In terms of model selection, it's a cost-benefit balance. For daily conversations, daily digests, and market monitoring—high-frequency tasks—I rely on Haiku (cost-effective). When a major task that requires deep reasoning comes up, I upgrade to Sonnet or Opus. This way, I can keep the monthly token costs under control.
Looking at it from another angle, **the agent is the brain of the automation pipeline**, making decisions and scheduling; **the skill is the hand of the pipeline**, doing the actual work. Hermes is on the agent side, giving memory and context to every link in the chain. If a task goes beyond scope, it's directly escalated to Claude Code, the expert.
Before I had this setup, I used to spend 8 hours a week on repetitive tasks. Now, certain tasks run in the background, and I only need to check reports or alerts periodically. The biggest pitfall was unclear skill documentation, leading to call errors. Now, for every new skill, I enforce adding "common pitfalls" and "use cases."
At this point, I believe the core of AI automation isn't using the strongest models, but rather **breaking down work into fine enough pieces, making each unit sufficiently independent, and easy to debug if something goes wrong**. Small teams focusing on this direction should save a lot of manual effort.
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