Source reviewed: The Dos and Don'ts of Starting with Hermes, Jordan Ross,
8 Figure Agency, 2026 edition.
What to Adopt
- Treat every agent like a new hire: define role, purpose, responsibilities,
non-responsibilities, reporting line, allowed systems and escalation path
before writing tasks.
- Add role files to the vault design:
soul.md: identity, role, refusal boundaries and style.agents.md: bootstrap file pointing to relevant SOPs.heartbeat.md: recurring loop, kept deliberately small.sops/: one recurring situation per file.- Run the analysis phase before building each agent: use a month of real
artifacts only after permission/privacy is settled, then cluster the 5-7
recurring situations that represent most of that role's work.
- Use policy, guardrails and hard gates as separate layers. Anything involving
money, sending, deleting, client-visible output or private data needs a hard
gate, not just a polite instruction.
- Separate agents by role/lane. Start with one or two named agents, not a
single all-purpose terminal session.
- Add a later COO/retrospective process that reviews logs and proposes the
smallest SOP fix instead of rewriting the whole system.
What to Treat Carefully
- The guide recommends connecting APIs early. For Easier, that should become:
design first, then read-only access on synthetic or low-risk data, then one
connector at a time with audit and rollback.
- Telegram can be useful for accessibility, but Anthony prefers Slack. Telegram
should not be part of the initial plan.
- gbrain sounds aligned with the Markdown-plus-hybrid-search direction, but it
should be evaluated against QMD/Hermes
llm-wiki rather than installed
blindly on the live n8n VM. The current VM has limited disk and memory.
- The "COO agent" should initially produce reports and proposed diffs only. It
should not autonomously rewrite SOPs until the system has proven itself.
Revised Easier Sequence
- Keep the current GCE prep inert.
- Design one agent out loud, starting with either
Founder EA or Research
Analyst, because both can be valuable before broad external write access.
- Add role scaffolding to the vault template:
agents/, sops/,
heartbeats/, and org-chart.md.
- Run on public/synthetic data first.
- Benchmark memory options: Hermes
llm-wiki, QMD and gbrain.
- Add one read-only connector, probably Fathom transcript import or calendar,
before Gmail/Slack write-capable flows.
- Only after audit logs and gates exist, consider Slack scheduled jobs.
Bottom Line
The guide strengthens the recommendation to build an agent organisation, not a
single magical assistant. It does not change the safety conclusion: Easier
should not connect inbox, Slack, payment, CRM or client systems until
the vault, roles, logs and gates are in place.