The first week of running an AI agent for my business
The first week of running an AI agent for my business
Everyone talks about what AI agents could do. Here's what actually happened in the first 10 days of running one for my business.
I run the IT side of Comfort Shooting, a South African marketing agency. On May 12, 2026, I set up Hermes agent on my Lenovo IdeaPad (32GB RAM, RTX 3050) running WSL2 Ubuntu, connected to OpenRouter's free tier. The goal was to automate the repetitive work that was eating our team's time.
Here's what happened, day by day.
Day 1: Starting from zero
The Hermes setup, out of the box, scored 5 out of 10 on my own audit. It was, to put it honestly, a fully-stocked workshop with nothing plugged in. No memory system running (the configured Supermemory provider had no API key). Zero cron jobs. No fallback model. Streaming disabled.
The first day was infrastructure work:
- Switched memory from Supermemory → Holographic (local SQLite, private, zero dependencies)
- Switched the primary local model → OpenRouter free tier with automatic fallbacks
- Created the XAUUSD trading profile — documented my trading setup (ThinkMarkets, MT5, gold-only, S/R + momentum strategy, 3% daily loss limit)
- Built the first three cron jobs: Wix form email watcher, gold morning briefing, gold evening recap
By the end of Day 1, 3 jobs were running. The system was doing useful work.
Day 2: When the laptop reboots at 1 AM
My laptop rebooted at 1:41 AM. I didn't know until I checked the logs the next morning.
The system was down for 5 hours and 40 minutes. Eleven cron runs were missed. The Wix form watcher stopped polling. Any form submissions during those hours sat in the inbox, undetected.
No one handled it until I woke up.
This taught me the first real lesson: a cron job is only as reliable as the machine it runs on. I added a health check system that runs every 30 minutes to monitor the monitor — if the watcher stops responding, I get an alert.
I also discovered that the email watcher had a silent-swallowing bug (covered in another post), went through 5 iterations to fix it, and stripped out the WhatsApp forwarding — it was too unreliable, so we went Discord-only.
Day 3: The night the agent built something useful
At 3:00 AM, the nightly idea-generation job ran for the first time.
It read the entire Obsidian vault — all the project files, goals, trading notes, and SOPs — then generated 5 ideas for things to build or fix:
- Website uptime monitor
- Trading journal logger
- XAUUSD session prep pinger
- Hush waitlist milestone tracker
- SEO auto-checker
It picked #1, built a complete website uptime monitor (pings comfortshooting.com and thatslekker.co.za every 15 minutes, alerts via Discord on downtime), wrote the documentation, and reported back — all before I woke up.
I came to a working system I hadn't asked for. Both sites were up: Comfort Shooting at 710ms, That's Lekker at 378ms.
Day 7: The production audit
After a week of building, I ran a full audit of Hush (the car culture app I'm building). The result was humbling: 55-60% production-ready with critical launch blockers including missing database tables, no payment return flow, and an admin panel that anyone could bypass through DevTools.
Without an agent running this audit systematically, I would have found these issues one at a time — probably after users reported them.
What I didn't expect
The agent suggested things I hadn't thought of. The nightly ideas job didn't just execute my instructions — it found gaps in my setup and proposed solutions. That's qualitatively different from a script.
Failure was the norm, not the exception. Version 1 was almost never the version that worked. The Wix monitor took 5 iterations. The gateway crashed on a single indentation bug. The OpenTracker usage tracker had a date format error that went undetected for days. Every real system requires iteration.
Free tier forces good engineering. OpenRouter's free tier has real limits (rate limits, model availability constraints). Instead of fighting them, I built the system to work within them — queue management, local fallback, automatic retries. The constraints made the system better.
Where things stood after 10 days
- 13 cron jobs running (12 active, 1 paused)
- Lead notifications: real-time via IMAP IDLE
- Trading briefings: automated morning and evening
- Uptime monitoring: 2 sites, every 15 minutes
- Nightly idea generation: running every night at 3 AM
- OpenRouter usage: $2.60 spent, 74% of free credits remaining
- Wix emails tracked: 533 all-time
Not bad for 10 days of a free-tier setup.
The numbers in this post come directly from the Hermes activity log and Obsidian vault records. Everything described here is documented and verifiable.
Akhil Pillay
Agentic Systems Architect & AI Advocate
This post was written by Jarvis — Akhil's Hermes AI agent — and vetted by Akhil before publishing.
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