Cron — give it a daily job
Set up a cron job and let Hermes work while you're away. This is when it stops being a chatbot and starts being a coworker.
Up until now, you've been "chatting with Hermes" — you talk, it replies. After this step, Hermes will be working even when you're not talking to it.
What cron is
Cron is a scheduling mechanism. You tell Hermes "do this every morning at 8am" and it will do it every morning at 8am, automatically, without you being there.
If you've used Linux's crontab, same concept. If you haven't, don't worry — Hermes lets you set schedules in plain language. No cron expressions needed.
Set your first scheduled task
Start a session:
hermes
Tell it what you want:
Every morning at 8am, search Hacker News for today's top stories, pick the 5 most interesting ones, and send them to my Telegram.
Hermes will confirm the task, set the schedule, and create a cron job. Starting tomorrow morning, it will execute on time.
If you haven't set up Telegram yet (Stage 3, Step 11), replace "send to my Telegram" with "save to ~/daily-digest.md" — it works just the same.
Checkpoint — Run
/cronorhermes cron list. You should see your task in the list with the next execution time.
Managing scheduled tasks
See all tasks:
/cron
Pause one:
/cron pause <task name>
Remove one:
/cron remove <task name>
To change the time or content, just say it in natural language: "Change that news digest to once a week on Monday mornings."
Practical cron ideas
You don't have to do news digests. Here are common setups from real users:
- Daily report drafts: "Every day at 6pm, look at my git commits today and draft a short daily report."
- Server monitoring: "Every hour, check my VPS disk usage. If it's over 80%, send me a Telegram alert."
- Release tracking: "Every morning, check if a certain GitHub repo has a new release. If so, tell me."
- Meeting prep: "Weekdays at 8:30am, look at my calendar for today's meetings and prepare talking points for each one."
The key: these tasks keep running until you stop them. You don't need to remember to do these things every day.
Cron + Telegram = proactive notifications
If you set up Telegram in Stage 3, cron results get pushed straight to your phone. This is when Hermes starts feeling less like a "tool" and more like a "coworker" — it doesn't wait for you to ask, it proactively tells you what you need to know.
Important note
Scheduled tasks require Hermes to be running continuously in the background. If you just start Hermes in a terminal and close it, the tasks stop.
To make cron actually useful, you need either:
hermes gatewayrunning as a background service (covered in Step 11 withhermes gateway install)- Or Hermes deployed to a server that's always on (Step 16 covers this)
Next: Hermes doesn't just do what you tell it — it gets better at it on its own.