Building Your Bot Crew -- Capstone

Start With Role Clarity

The most common mistake when building a bot crew is creating bots before deciding what they are for. The configuration options -- model pin, SOUL.md, skills, routines -- are all easier to fill in once a role is clearly defined. Start with roles, then let the configuration follow.

A three-bot crew covers the most common automation patterns and is a manageable starting point. Here is a crew design that works well across many contexts:

• Researcher -- reads, synthesizes, and summarizes. Focuses on web search, document analysis, and producing structured reports. Best paired with a strong reasoning model. SOUL.md should emphasize citation, accuracy, and concise synthesis. A good routine: a daily briefing on a topic area you track.
• Coder -- reads and modifies code, runs terminal commands, debugs. Clone from your main profile to inherit toolsets and API configuration. SOUL.md should emphasize reasoning before writing, clean output, and explaining changes. Routine: an end-of-day git summary.
• Monitor -- checks status, reports anomalies, sends alerts. Create empty to keep it lightweight -- it needs only the tools required for health checks, nothing more. Pair with a faster, cheaper model. Routine: a short-interval check (every 30 or 60 minutes) with a clear pass/fail output format.

Creating the Three Bots

Create each bot from the Bots Pane using the configurations above. For the Researcher and Monitor, use Fresh or Create Empty profiles to avoid inheriting toolsets that are not relevant to the role. For the Coder, Clone from your main profile so it inherits your working configuration.

Set the model pin for each bot in the Advanced options. Pin the Researcher to your strongest available reasoning model. The Coder can share your main profile's model. The Monitor should use a fast, low-cost model -- it runs frequently and its tasks are simple.

Write a SOUL.md for each bot. Keep them short: three to five sentences that define the role, the expected output format, and any constraints. The Researcher's SOUL.md might say it always cites sources; the Monitor's might say it always returns a structured status block.

Adding Routines

Open the Routines pane for each bot and add at least one routine per bot. Use the structured schedule picker for common schedules (daily, weekly) and the Advanced field if you need a specific time or interval.

After creating all routines, verify from the terminal:

hermes cron list

You should see all three bots' routines in the output, each labeled with its [bot:<name>] namespace. If a routine is missing, it was not saved -- return to the Routines pane and recreate it.

Setting Up the Group Chat

Right-click the Researcher in the roster and create a group with all three bots as members. Then test the group with a few different message types:

• Send a message with no @mentions. Observe which bots choose to respond and which pass. This shows you their decision-making about relevance.
• Send a message @mentioning a specific bot. Confirm that bot responds and the others do not.
• Pose a task that genuinely requires all three -- for example, "Research the current state of X, then draft a code snippet that implements Y based on that research, and confirm the system is healthy enough to run it." Watch how the serial rounds handle delegation.

CLI Reference Review

From the terminal, you now have full visibility into the crew without opening the Desktop app:

• hermes profile list -- confirms all three profiles exist
• hermes cron list -- shows all routines with their [bot:<name>] labels
• hermes -p researcher chat -- opens a direct CLI session with the Researcher bot
• hermes -p monitor chat -- same for the Monitor
• hermes pets -- browse the petdex to assign pixel pets to each bot

What Comes Next

The crew you have built is entirely local. The next growth step is extending it across machines:

• Register a second machine in Settings → Connections to add its bots to your shared roster and group chats.
• If the second machine runs the api_server gateway, register it with hermes peer add so your bots can reach its bots headlessly from within routines.
• As roles become clearer from actual use, tighten the skill and toolset configuration per bot -- restrict each bot to only the tools its role actually needs.

Bot Mode is designed to grow with your workflow. Start with three bots and real routines, learn from what they produce, and add specialization as the patterns emerge.