Open your To Do list or task manager right now. Scroll past the urgent stuff. Find the section you keep pushing down.

Those are your P3 tasks. Important, but never urgent enough to touch. Sitting there for months or sometimes years like organise my files. Clean up contacts. Set up automations. Catch up on reading.

A personal AI agent won’t change your ambitions. But it will quietly clear that list while you sleep.

One Topic: Why You Should Build Your Personal AI Agent?

Do You Actually Need One?

Here’s a quick check. If two or more of these are true, the answer is yes:

• You repeat the same digital tasks every week
• You spend 2+ hours on copy-paste, formatting, or status updates
• You’ve missed follow-ups because there are just too many
• Your P3 list hasn’t moved in 90 days

The real test is your backlog. If it has five or more items that haven’t moved in three months or hundreds of tabs open that one day you will take some action, a personal agent is the support for you, not a better to-do app.

OpenClaw or Hermes – Which One?

Both are open-source, self-hosted personal agents. But they solve slightly different problems.

• Choose OpenClaw if you want the largest ready-to-use skill library (5,700+ on ClawHub), multiple platform integrations, smart home integrations, and quick plug-and-play setup. It communicates through WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and works well for people who want breadth of integrations fast. It’s good if like tinkering or just love technology.
• Choose Hermes if you want an agent that actually learns about you and with you over time. Hermes, built by Nous Research, has a closed learning loop, it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, builds persistent memory, and deepens its model of who you are across sessions.

The short version: OpenClaw is a capable toolkit. Hermes is stronger when you want a safer-by-default, long-running agent that compounds through use.

Tbh, both are good, use start with one, eventually add another one as well. For beginners, start with Hermes. One command installs everything – no prerequisites, no manual setup. Run it on a local machine (recommended) or VPS.

The Self-Evolving Feature And Why It Matters

This is what separates Hermes from most agents. Most AI tools forget you the moment a session ends. Hermes doesn’t. OpenClaw can do as well but we need to build memory system around that. (note: OpenClaw is also upgrading memory soon)

After every complex task, it autonomously creates reusable skill documents, improves them during use, and builds searchable session history across all your conversations.

Over weeks, it starts to model patterns, how you like to communicate, what projects you’re running, how you prefer decisions framed. It’s less a tool you use, and more infrastructure that runs alongside you.

Which Model to Use (And What It Costs)

Here’s the honest breakdown:

• OpenAI Plus – $20/month. Clean, reliable, good for beginners who want zero setup friction. Best for light agent use.
• MiniMax M2.5/M2.7 – Start with $10–$20/month coding plan. M2.5 scores 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified at roughly one-twentieth the cost of frontier models that makes it one of the best value-for-money models for agent workflows right now.
• Ollama (local/cloud) – $0 to test or $20/month. If privacy is non-negotiable, run models locally. No API cost, no data leaving your machine and zero dollar but you need good machine. You can use $20 plan that give generous use of cloud model. It’s totally worth it.
• OpenRouter – Start with $0, add credit to use hundreds of free and paid model.

My recommendation: start with ChapGPT or MiniMax M2.7 via OpenRouter. Good intelligence, affordable pricing, and Hermes integrates directly with it. Or ChapGPT if planning to use with OpenClaw.

20 Things Your Agent Can Handle Starting This Week

Here’s a list of tasks I thought could give you some perspective, but it’s just the beginning.

1. Morning news brief to Telegram
2. Weekly expense summary from email receipts
3. Summarise unread newsletters
4. Archive inactive projects
5. Draft replies to recurring email types
6. Remind you of follow-ups after meetings
7. Monitor job listings for a specific role
8. Organise downloads into folders daily
9. Track your team’s weekly updates into one doc
10. Send reading list to Kindle every Friday
11. Log your mood/journal via WhatsApp
12. Pull weekly analytics from a dashboard
13. Research product alternatives before you buy
14. Create a weekly summary of your calendar
15. Monitor social media mentions of your brand
16. Automate birthday reminders with draft messages
17. Create a nightly task review and tomorrow’s prep
18. Categorise and tag saved articles or build you second brain like LLM wiki.
19. Generate a weekly highlight reel from your notes
20. Send you a Sunday planning prompt at 8am

Not all of these are complicated. The point is: start with one. Let it run for few days, till you see it’s helping you.

Security Disclaimer – Read This First

Before you connect any agent to your email, calendar, or files:

• Use a dedicated API key, never your main account credentials
• Don’t grant file system access beyond what the specific task needs, start with read permission only
• Review what permissions each skill requests before running it
• OpenClaw has known prompt injection vulnerabilities that have been documented in security research, apply hardening steps before connecting external services
• Hermes defaults to safer settings, but no self-hosted agent is risk-free

Treat your agent like a new hire with limited access start small, verify the work, expand gradually.

The 90-Minute Weekend Start

Hour 1: Install Hermes. Follow the official quick start at hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs. Connect Telegram as your interface.

First task: “Every morning at 8am, search for top AI news and send me three headlines on Telegram.”

Week 1: Watch it run. Correct where it misses.

Week 2: Add a second task only after the first is reliable.

The goal isn’t the most impressive setup. It’s the most useful one, the kind you forget is running because it just works.

That’s when an agent stops being a project and becomes boring infrastructure. And boring infrastructure is exactly what changes how you work.

Interested in travel or photography, read last week’s LensLetter newsletter about Computational Photography.

Read last week’s JustDraft about comparison between Hermes vs OpenClaw vs Paperclip.

Two Quotes to Inspire

The best systems in your life are the ones you forget are running, not because they’ve failed, but because they’ve become essential.

The future belongs to people who delegate before they optimise.

One Passage From My Bookshelf

“Being busy is a form of laziness lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing. The key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

“Focus on being productive instead of busy. There is no shortage of time, only a lack of direction. People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty because it feels safer.”

From The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy (Tim) Ferriss