Idea Research

16.1. Idea Research

Diverse idea sources, not just plain web search

• Web search + browser automation to research topics, trends, and competitors.
• YouTube transcript skill: turn a video into a summary, mining insights from existing content instead of creating from scratch — useful when you want to “learn” from a topic-focused channel and turn it into a source for many future articles.
• /learn (covered in 10.4): when you want Hermes to understand a field deeply enough to generate ideas with the right “flavor” — point it at documents, books, or case studies and let it build a knowledge-base skill.

A field-tested workflow in the style of “weekly competitive analysis”

A canonical example recorded in the documentation: an agent fetches the latest news about 3 competitors and compiles it into a comparison report on product positioning — each step consumes the previous step’s result, deciding on its own which tool to call. Apply the exact same pattern to content: research a topic → identify the angle still missing in the market → produce a grounded list of ideas.

Notes

• Wire this research step into a weekly cron (/cron add "every 1w" "find trending topics in industry X, suggest 5 article ideas") — turning “brainstorming” from a whim into a steady source of ideas.
• For topics that demand high accuracy, always require the agent to cite sources alongside each idea — easy to verify, and it avoids writing based on the agent’s own extrapolation.