Effective habits

Habits that make local Hermes genuinely useful day to day.

Core habits

1. Verify offline setup first. 64k context + tool-calling model. Everything else builds on this.
2. Start from project root. Context files load automatically.
3. Brief like an agent. Concrete goals, not vague questions.
4. Require approval for destructive ops. approvals.mode: manual (or smart) always.
5. Disable web toolsets when offline. Prevents wasted tool rounds.
6. Iterate in session. Follow-ups beat restarting.
7. Move repeats up the ladder. Prompt → context → skill → cron.
8. Review agent-created skills. Before trusting them with shell access.

Habits by situation

Agent tries web search offline: Disable web toolsets in config.

Agent is slow: Use a smaller fallback (e.g. qwen3.5:9b) for simple tasks, Qwen 3.5 27B for agentic work. Schedule heavy jobs off-hours.

Agent forgets mid-task: Check Ollama context length. Likely set to 2048.

Agent only chats, no tools: Model lacks tool calling. Switch to qwen3.5:27b or similar.

Quality is poor: Try larger model, or add cloud fallback for hard tasks only.

Weekly practice

• Review ~/.hermes/memory/ for stale entries.
• Check agent-created skills for accuracy.
• Run one use case you haven't tried yet.
• Note what you repeated and promote it to a skill.

The one-sentence summary

Configure offline correctly once, then systematize everything you do twice.