Automation
- Scheduled Tasks
- Crons with Skills
- Webhooks
- Scripts without LLM
- Multiplatform Delivery
- Alerts Only If Necessary
12. Automation — Turning the Agent into a Self-Running System
This chapter pulls together the foundational mechanism that has been appearing scattered across earlier chapters (17.4 KPI Reports, 18 Monitoring, 19.6 Results Delivered) into a complete picture of how Hermes runs itself without anyone pressing a button. If the earlier chapters are concrete applications, chapter 12 is the technical machinery behind all of them — the cron scheduler, webhook triggers, and the design rules that keep an automated system from becoming a source of noise or cost.
Two ways a task gets triggered: by time or by event
| Mechanism | Fires when | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Cron (12.1, 12.2) | The set schedule arrives | Periodic reports, health checks, weekly rollups |
| Webhook (12.3) | An external event happens | New PRs, new issues, incoming messages, status changes |
As already said in chapter 17: cron “flips the model” — instead of a human starting things, the agent wakes up on schedule, does the work, then goes back to sleep. Webhooks go the opposite way — the agent waits, and only reacts when the outside world reports that something happened.
Three design principles that run through the whole chapter
- Each run is a completely fresh session — no conversation is inherited, so the prompt must carry its own context (12.1).
- Not everything needs an LLM — deterministic scripts are cheaper, faster, and more reliable for the mechanical parts (12.4).
- Silence is a feature, not a bug — a good automation system must know when to say nothing (12.6).