By role: who automates what
The collection of user stories in the official docs shows that the people running Hermes are not one class of user. Five groups stand out in practice: developers, operations/DevOps, business and support teams, research/analytics, and personal users. What each group automates differs — and not by accident: everyone automates their own daily repetition.
| Role | Typical automation | Mechanism used |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Preparing code reviews, exploring a repo, multi-step refactors, writing tests | CLI, IDE (ACP), delegation |
| QA | Summarising test results, tracking flaky tests, drafting defect reports | Cron, webhooks (CI events) |
| DevOps / SRE | Log analysis, a daily health report, alert triage, configuration diffs | Cron (`--no-agent` watchdogs), gateway |
| Analyst | Gathering data from sources, multi-source comparison, drafting reports | Cron, MCP, code execution |
| Support / operations | Ticket triage, drafting answers to recurring questions, briefings | Gateway (Slack/Teams), skills |
| Personal use | A daily digest, email triage, notes, reminders | Cron + messaging |
In a corporate context the more important question is: who may allow the agent to do what? That is an organisational decision rather than a technical one, and it splits into three levels:
- Administrator — configuration pinned at system level (model, security settings), where the agent runs, which backend
- Team lead / owner — which channel has a bot, who is admin, which slash commands regular users may run
- Individual user — which toolsets, skills and cron jobs in their own session
The healthy model is: the user automates their own workflow, and the administrator sets the boundaries.
A rule for sizing: the value of automating is frequency × time per run × risk of error, while the cost is setup + maintenance + the price of a wrong result. A task that takes 2 minutes once a day is 8 hours a year — worth automating. A task that takes 20 minutes once a month usually is not.
Practice. Fill in a table for your own team: rows are roles, columns are "what gets automated", "which mechanism", "which permission is needed", "who approves". Write at least three rows. Done means: at least one row ends with "we do not automate this, because…".
📚 Sources and documentation
- User storiesofficialhermes-agent.nousresearch.com
A large collection of automations built by real users.
- Scheduled tasksofficialhermes-agent.nousresearch.com
- Managed scope: administrator controlofficialhermes-agent.nousresearch.com