Building a Friendly Data Assistant

Whether you are an expert coder or just curious about AI, I hope this friendly guide inspires you to try building an agent of your own!

What is Hermes Agent, Anyway?

Think of a standard AI as a helpful chatbot that answers questions when you ask them. An AI Agent, on the other hand, is more like a proactive assistant. You give it a big goal, and it sits down, makes a step-by-step plan, uses digital tools, runs code, and checks its own work until the job is done.

For my project, I wanted to track market prices for three major dairy products: Cheddar Blocks, Butter, and Dry Whey. Instead of doing all the math and graphing by myself, I let Hermes Agent take the wheel.

The Magic of Multi-Step Reasoning

The coolest part of working with Hermes Agent is watching it "think". When I asked my agent to look at our data database (market_intelligence_3.db) and find the best trading strategy,it followed a beautiful planning loop:

1. Checking the Files: It looked at our setup files (tickers.yaml and requirements.txt) to make sure all its tools were ready.




2. Running the Math: It triggered a Python program (backtest_engine.py) to study weekly market history.




3. Making Decisions: It realized that Dry Whey was way too wild and risky to trade right now, so it intelligently gave it a 0% safety rating and put the focus on Cheddar and Butter instead.




4. Drawing and Sharing: It automatically drew a beautiful performance chart (backtest_analysis.png), saved the numbers to a spreadsheet (portfolio_comparison.csv), and sent a neat summary directly to our team chat!

What I Learned & Tips for Success

Working with open agent systems taught me a couple of great lessons:

• Clear instructions matter: Agents do best when you give them clear boundaries. Writing down simple project rules in a file called AGENTS.md helped my assistant stay perfectly on track.




• Uncorrelated doesn't mean helpful: Just because an asset moves differently from others doesn't make it a safe bet if it is losing value. My agent figured this out mathematically and saved us from a bad investment!

How I Want to Improve This Work

This is just the beginning! If I had more time to expand this project, here is the future work I would love to tackle:

• Live Pings: Right now, the pipeline runs when we ask it to. I want to use a script like fetch_live_data.py to pull live data from the web and have the agent send an automatic text alert if prices drop suddenly.




• Teaching the Agent to Read News: I want to give the agent a web-browsing tool so it can read daily farming and business news headlines. This would help it combine math data with real-world news events!




• A Simple Dashboard: I would love to build a colorful, easy-to-read website where anyone can see the agent's latest recommendations without needing to look at text logs.

I am so grateful to have participated in the Hermes Agent Challenge! It has completely changed how I think about programming and automated data systems.