From checking me in for a flight while I was drunk to chasing government refunds, planning cycle routes, and registering me for Council Tax. Here’s what I actually use an AI agent for outside of coding.

Saturday I'm in an Izakaya in Tokyo. I brought 1 Suntory Highball and magically within 10 seconds it is gone. The next day, I'm meant to be flying back to the UK. I remember:

I still need to check in... fuuu....

So I do what any normal person does, I pull out my phone and I slur into Wispr Flow something like this:

Check in to the flight for me and send me a map with a route on how I'm going to get there

2 hours later, the AI comes back to me.

It has checked into my flight, creating a GitHub repo to make it easier to check in again in the future (and the README was written exactly how I like my READMEs to be written)

GitHub - bee-san/airplane-checkin-skill: Privacy-conscious Hermes skill for scheduled, verified multi-airline check-in with a guarded ANA adapter

Privacy-conscious Hermes skill for scheduled, verified multi-airline check-in with a guarded ANA adapter - bee-san/airplane-checkin-skill

GitHubbee-san

It read my emails and realised I came to Japan with 2 suitcases, so she booked my second suitcase.

She recalls where I am staying and creates 3 routes for me:

1. The "Early bird" route that gets me there with enough time
2. The "Hung over" route that has very minimal changes but is still quite early
3. The cutting it close route that combines (2) but allows me to sleep in for a bit longer

She then created a clean, high quality boarding pass image with my QR code and all relevant data, recreating the QR code to be higher quality since the one in the email was low quality.

She knows I like to keep people informed of my flights, so she activates an hourly cron that messages my friends information about my flight too.

So within 2 hours she had:

• Checked into my flight
• Created tooling to make this easier in the future
• Booked another suitcase
• Came up with a route for me to follow
• Let my friends know about my flight regularly
• Created a boarding pass for me to use

You would think my agent is perfect and that this is too good to be true, well reader it is too good to be true. My agent forgot that I am vegan and I was forced to eat bread for my entire 13 hour flight 😂

From 17 to 31 August 2026, my AI agent recorded everything I asked her to do. I intended to stop at two weeks. Then Lime emailed me a parking warning before I finished editing.

This post was inspired by my former colleague Sophie Koonin's Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer and her senior engineer follow-up.

This post is not written with AI, any AI parts will be pointed out. It is just images / images of AI generated frontends.

Things I asked my AI agent to do

Please do my admin 🥺

Probably the number 1 use of my agent is all my admin related questions.

• "Why don't I have my student finance refund yet?"

They sent me a letter saying they owe me a refund.

I login to the website after 2 hours of trying and it says no refund.

🤷

I'm too lazy to deal with this, so I ask my AI agent to handle it.

1. Calculate how much I am owed (£2000 roughly. Weird Student Finance England [SFE] doesn't tell you, but if you get a letter from them it is worth chasing).
2. Found the SFE complaint email address
3. Sent a formal complaint about this discrepancy, and monitors for replies everyday.

I told her to just handle it for me until they pay me back.

Like typical SFE fashion, I expect them to reply within the next 365 days 🫠

Lime Bike Warnings

In Tokyo I parked a lime bike like this:

The app told me it was in a parking spot and to me it looks like it's parked and not at all "blocking the sidewalk or right of way"

I told my AI agent to handle this for me. Complain, and then monitor the complaint.

Normally I'd be too lazy to do that, thankfully my agent does not experience laziness.

Eye Tests

Jins in Tokyo is known for having great eyewear, great service at low costs.

You can get a free eye test, buy glasses, and pick up prescription glasses within 2 hours. Maybe you shouldn't have gone to Specsavers and instead gone to Tokyo.

They gave me my prescription but I didn't fancy buying any glasses.

I asked AI to just save it to Paperless for me so I don't forget.

Over-engineering my document storage system with Paperless-ngx

I think the first realisation that I was getting old was when I implemented a system to store physical + digital documents and was excited about it. My previous document system looked a little something like this: Whenever someone asked me “hey can you prove you got a C in GCSE

Skerritt.blogAutumn Skerritt

Reminders

1. Remind me to pay rent (I forgot what day it was, it checked my contract)
2. What weekend am I hanging out with Cynthia again? I forgot to write it down (AI checked WhatsApp using wacli)
3. Unsubscribe me from all this email spam pls 🙏 (it uses FastMail MCP)
4. I ordered something and only half of it came, where is the other half? It followed the email trailer and sent me a delivery screenshot proving only half was delivered.

I just moved houses and oh my the admin

Read the email from the letting company about everything I need to sign up for. Sign up for it all, making accounts, and ensuring it is cheap. Here is the account number and sort code for a virtual account. Send me my account details encrypted.

Importantly for security:

1. I gave my AI virtual accounts which contain an amount of money I don't mind losing on AI Shenanigans
2. My AI does not have access to my password manager and I change all passwords it makes.
3. I set up 2fa and ensure the agent can't see it, that way it can't use access to my email to reset passwords behind my back.
   1. this is where hardware keys are cool, good luck holding your finger on a Yubikey malicious AI ;)
4. I built a tool to approve all documents my AI signs / makes. Basically the AI can sign documents, but not send them. The actual final approval comes from me, where I check to make sure it hasn't signed me up for anything crazy.
   1. This tool is kinda cool, it brainwashes the AI into thinking it submitted a document but really it just sent it to me, so even if it was malicious it won't sign bad contracts for me. It doesn't work for everything, but it does work for the things I care about such as contracts, filing complaints, messaging people on WhatsApp etc etc. I might make a public release of this.

My AI can spawn a FireFox browser:

GitHub - jo-inc/camofox-browser: Stealth headless browser for AI agents — bypass Cloudflare, bot detection, and anti-scraping. Drop-in Puppeteer/Playwright replacement.

Stealth headless browser for AI agents — bypass Cloudflare, bot detection, and anti-scraping. Drop-in Puppeteer/Playwright replacement. - jo-inc/camofox-browser

GitHubjo-inc

And then can use Playwright to interact with websites.

The AI then (with my approvals):

1. Signed up for council tax and got a single persons discount (this was rather easy)
2. Signed up for Octopus energy and input all my energy details (didn't choose a plan, I need Octopus to email me and then I will set it up myself)
3. Did the same for Water (bit harder, but roughly the same as Octopus)
4. Signed into my deposit scheme and downloaded the PDF, storing it into Paperless (very easy)

Getting me out of Japan

Like most people airports are an absolute nightmare for me.

Let's recap the intro quickly:

• Checked in for me
• Planned a route for me to go home
• Sent me my boarding pass
• Cron my flight and send it to me friends

But then some other things.

• "Can I put a Wii U in my luggage?"

the game pad has a battery

• "When I flew here the Wi-Fi portal didn't appear, send me every portal link"

thank god I asked this. Again, no Wi-Fi portal. But one of the links worked and I got access to the plane Wi-Fi!!

• "Can I put an XBox into my luggage?" Yuppers!
• "How long can I stay before security?"

Found the live gate info and boarding information, let me know I am fine to stay longer and enjoy more time with friends. I am so grateful I got to spend an extra 30 minutes with my favourite people in the world.

• "Did you forget I am vegan"

The AI agent forgot to mention I am Vegan in the checkin, so I asked it and told it to remember. Then like a normal human being I asked the flight attendant and thankfully there was a spare meal, but all the other meals were just going to be bread for me haha.

• "What does SNEVE mean?" - Just a graffiti tag I see around Tokyo a lot more now. I wanted to know where it came from.
• "I lost my umbrella at this station, what exact time did I reach the station?" -> Uses Google Timeline data although the umbrella was never found 😞

That time a finance question became a full on company

Anyone who knows me knows I like to run my finances like the military.

Multiple dashboards, spreadsheets, YNAB, Actual Budget, Hledger etc. I have used it all.

But lately I have been slacking.

• “Why has this month been so expensive?” -> It uses Actual Budget to work things out for me.
• “Send me a tiny spending report every morning.” Made a Hermes Agent to analyse my finances and send it to me each morning.

Had a heart attack because how am I not spending money right now, but back in March I spent £12k??

So I asked my AI agent

• "How did I spend £12k and why is my spending so low in August? I LITERALLY bought a flight to Italy and Tokyo this month"

Turned out my Monzo API connector broke, so it fixed that for me.

Then I have more than just Monzo. It counts transfers as expenses since it can't see my other accounts, hence the £12k spending was just a bank transfer to my savings account.

I talked to it a bit, turns out TrueLayer is still the best solution in 2026 for OpenBanking.

• “Turn Actual Budget into hledger.”

I kinda wanted plain text accounting, so this started out as an importer and turned into:

1. A full on GitHub repository
2. Accounting models
3. Private web app to display the graph from my previous question

• “Give me somewhere to fix uncategorised transactions.”

I told the AI to make a rule system. Every time it comes across a vendor, categorise it using these rules. If a rule doesn't exist, put it into a web app.

Also make a webapp that lets me assign categories to these transactions and remember rules.

Also expose it over Tailscale.

I gave my friend an AI

basically my mate and I wanted to cycle to Totono no Mori 1, which is like middle of nowhere Inaka country.

There's hyper localised storms in Tokyo and most people use this weather map app thing to work out where those localised storms are

Now the problem with this is that you have to check often.

So I asked my AI

• "We're cycling from Tokyo to Totoro no Mori 1, check for localised storms along the route every 10 mins and let us know on WhatsApp if there's a storm"

So it did just that, worked out the route, made the cron and it worked.

Well, not really. It was using a non Japanese weather source which wasn't updated as frequently, so we had to huddle into a 7 while we worked out a safe way to get home mid storm.

But this expanded into...

• "Every 1 minute, check WhatsApp for the keyword "Shiki". If this is mentioned, action it as a Hermes Agent request"

Shiki is just a name of someone from a game I am playing

This way it gave my friend access to my AI agent. This is because I didn't have a phone plan or signal in Japan

This let my friend use my agent to plan a safe route home :) Which was a stupid route, so my friend and I got the bus.

AI is so great, but like most humans it can fail and be a bit silly. So always best to double check.

My friend subsequently used the AI to generate a 10 page PDF on how to take care of their Thai Holy Basil Plants.

Specifically how to care for them in late summer, on a Tokyo balcony, using blogs / videos from other Tokyo residents who are doing the same as references.

I asked my friend what they liked about the AI, and they said their favourite part was learning to copy their emotes / their speaking style

Running my AI estate

My Hermes Agent is Codex for Open Source (Thanks OpenAI! <3) running on an older Macbook air with an M2 and 4gb of RAM I think (or is it 8?). It has a 256gb hard drive.

These limitations mean sometimes it dies, so I have to spend a lot of time keeping it healthy.

• “Audit the whole Hermes setup.” It checked credentials, integrations, schedules, logs, fallbacks and disk growth, then separated real problems from things I merely enjoy worrying about (a favourite past time of the British)

I then obviously asked my agent to fix all the problems it found.

• “Why is Hermes eating so much disk?” When my macbook hits 256gb/256gb used, it just kinda explodes and its a massive pain to fix. This is probably the number 1 thing I ask my AI to do
• “Install XXX, expose via tailscale”

Anytime I see something cool on r/selfhosted I make my AI agent install it so I can try it, then I ask it to remove it right after cause I don't like it.

• “Where is Jellyfin?”

One day I will learn to use domain names for my self hosted setup, today is not that day.

As a full time SRE/Platform Engineer/System Engineer I do not want to do more of my job at home.

• “Which skills and scripts could be public?”

I like to publish things on GitHub, I have to maintain my position as top 200 on GitHub World Wide™️

Tokyo side quests

• “Can I cycle the Yamanote route without melting also send me a GPX route that avoids tunnels, main roads, and goes near kombini. Also I want to collect all Eki stamps, put me as close to them as possible”

Eki Stamps are one of my favourite past times

Eki stamp - Wikipedia

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects

It ranked the days and found the best day for me to do this, and the route was pretty goated. I even sent the GPX file to my Garmin Watch to act as a SatNav style device.

When I got to each waypoint for the stamp, the stamp was only like 10m away.

If it was a bit further, the agent also sent an English translated PDF of a Japanese website listing all stamp locations.

Shame I couldn't complete it though

• “Where can I park a Lime bike?”

Mate that app is the worst designed app ever. Even when it said I could park, they STILL WARNED ME!!!!

• “Find the Key visual-novel shop.”

I heard there's a Key shop, didn't know where it was. ChatGPT told me it didn't exist lol

I can promise you it is not Trader.

Thankfully my AI agent found it. It's a popup shop in Animate 🥳

• “Will Akihabara’s pedestrianised street run if it rains?”

Every Sunday Akiba closes the roads so you can walk on them. It's so cool and magical.

Sometimes it doesn't run due to rain/heat, so my agent checked for me.

Help my mate find a job

• "Build a career profile from her GitHub / LinkedIn"

Oh I use Obsidian as my memory system, so it just made an Obsidian file of her.

• "Make her a master LaTeX CV, 5 pages"

Used said profile + CV she provided me, made a LaTeX CV.

• "Every Saturday search for jobs that match her profile, and then edit the LaTeX CV to 2 pages specific for that job"

Pretty cool it can do this, so now it's quite easy for her to apply to jobs.

Presuming the CV isn't complete and utter slop, generally it looks okay. But she does need to open the CV in Vim to edit it.

Conclusion

Anything you can use a computer for, you can ask Hermes to do for you

I read this once on Reddit, and I couldn't agree more.

My Agent does so much for me everyday, I couldn't imagine living without it.

But, it is still not perfect. I don't trust it with my passwords or banking information unlike some people I know. It also gets things wrong, which is okay so long as it does some work in finishing the task so I don't start from 0. I also have to teach my AI how I like to do things, so sometimes it doesn't do it in the method/order I like

I highly suggest you get an AI agent and try to automate some of the boring stuff.

Tools I use

A question you will have is "What tools do I use to do all this?"

1. Hermes Agent
   1. Telegram is my preffered way to talk, I have 1 main agent and like 1 agent for finance stuff
   2. I use Wispr Flow to speak to my agent, although Telegram voice notes work too.
      1. Wispr Flow says I speak at 108 wpm, which is slower than my typing at 138wpm. I don't pay for it, but sometimes I am too lazy to type.
2. Camofox + playwright for browser automation
3. DontSetch for search
4. wacli for WhatsApp
5. codex for open source, for my ai model of choice. i just use it because it's free for me. thank u openai <3 :)
6. Mnemosyne for persistent memory, I don't notice this that much
7. Obsidian for memory + storage of files / useful research
8. actual budget mcp, paperless mcp, super markets mcp, vinted mcp, ebay mcp
9. google mcp, connects to my cal / emails / google maps etc
10. gh cli, which i use extensively for access to github
11. tailscale, which i use to connect to things the AI agent makes
12. restic, to backup my ai agent computer
13. old macbook air, you don't really need a lot of power unless you want local models.
14. paperless-ngx to store documents

I think an important tip is just to start small, your agent will learn about you and together you will make skills, automations, and tooling to improve your life.

This is just 2 weeks of AI usage, there is so much cool stuff I do every day. Maybe if you want, I can write a list of my favourite things Hermes has done for me in the 5 months I've been using it.