Archiles

Notes on systems, tools, and the process of figuring things out — mostly for myself.

5 minute read

TL;DR: AI does a lot of my admin at work, but the thing I’m proudest of is Hermes, a family assistant in our Telegram group that keeps the shopping list, posts reminders and only emails after someone taps Approve. It cost one Sunday and about USD 20 a month. The priceless part is still to come: the first time one of the kids asks it for homework help and gets a question back instead of the answer.

In my consulting work, AI already does a lot of my day. It drafts, it takes meeting notes, it writes the follow-ups, and it chips away at the admin. All useful. None of it makes me smile. The thing I’ve built with it that I’m proudest of is Hermes, a family assistant that lives in our family Telegram group, and the job it does best is the most ordinary one in the house: keeping track of what we need to buy.

You’ll remember the old credit card ads. A few items with prices, then one thing at the end that money can’t buy. Hermes fits that shape better than I expected, so here it is, priced line by line.

A Claude Pro plan: about USD 20 a month

This is the brain, and the only line that costs real money.

Using Hermes takes no effort at all. Nobody opens an app, fills in a form or learns a command. Anyone in the group just types the way they’d text a person:

  • “add beras 5 kg”
  • “what’s still on the list?”

Hermes gets it. The rice goes on the list, and the list comes back when someone asks. Nobody has to remember the exact wording, which matters, because nobody in a family group chat has ever typed anything the same way twice.

A small cloud server: 0.00 this month

Hermes needs somewhere to live, and this month that costs nothing. It’s my favourite number in the whole piece.

Behind the chat, Hermes keeps the shopping list in a Google Sheet with tick boxes. That’s the reassuring part. The list isn’t hidden in some black box. It’s a sheet, with boxes, that any of us could open and read. When something gets bought, a box gets ticked. That’s the whole system, and it’s the right size for a household.

Hermes also looks up rough online prices, so the list gives a feel for what a shop will cost before anyone leaves the house. “Rough” is the honest word here. It’s a guide, not a receipt.

A Telegram bot: free

Free, and it’s the part everyone touches. Hermes is just another member of the group chat, sitting between the family photos and the “who’s picking up whom” messages.

It posts reminders, so the group gets a nudge instead of someone being the designated nagger. In most families that job lands on the same person every time. Handing it to a bot is a small kindness.

Hermes can also email the family. But it doesn’t just fire off emails when it feels like it. It only sends after someone in the group taps Approve. I like that rule a lot. It means Hermes is helpful without being presumptuous.

One Sunday of setting it up

That’s the real cost: one Sunday. Not a month of evenings or a weekend lost to it. One day, and then it just ran.

Not everything worked, of course. At one point we checked whether Hermes could use the big online shops directly. The big online shops took one look and decided it was a robot.

Which is fair. It is a robot.

I can’t even be annoyed. Somewhere there’s a security system doing exactly what it should, and Hermes went back to the Google Sheet and the rough prices with no hard feelings. Neither of us took it personally.

The moment it won me over

This morning I told Hermes we had bought three Aqua gallons, one Indomaret gallon and two litres of cooking oil.

It answered that those were already marked as bought.

Fine. Somebody had beaten me to it. That’s the system working: the list knew before I did.

Then it asked how much was left, so it could start working out how fast our household goes through water.

I put my phone down for a second. I’d told it what we bought, and it asked a question back. Not a clever question, a practical one, the kind a sensible person asks when they want to stop being surprised by an empty gallon. It wanted to learn something about our house so it could be more useful to us next time.

That’s when I stopped thinking of Hermes as a list with a chat window on it.

Still to come: priceless

Here’s the part that hasn’t happened yet. It’s a plan, and I’m writing it down so I hold myself to it.

The kids aren’t in the group yet. When they join, I already know what will happen sooner or later. One of them will be stuck on homework, they’ll notice there’s a helpful thing in the family chat that answers everything, and they’ll ask Hermes for the answer.

What I want is for Hermes to reply with a question instead of the answer.

Not to be difficult, and not to lecture. Just to do what it did with the water this morning: ask the useful question back. What do you already know? Where did you get stuck? What would you try first?

I can picture the face that goes with it. Mild outrage. A child realising the robot that keeps the rice list has quietly decided to be a teacher. I’m fairly sure the first reaction will be a complaint in the group chat, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

That’s the line at the bottom of the ad:

  • A Claude Pro plan: about USD 20 a month.
  • A small cloud server: 0.00 this month.
  • A Telegram bot: free.
  • One Sunday of setting it up.
  • The first time one of the kids asks Hermes for homework help and gets a question instead of an answer: priceless.

What I take from it

At work, AI saves me time, and I’m grateful for that. At home it does something else. It takes the small, repeated, slightly tiring jobs off everyone in the family, tick by tick, and once in a while it asks a better question than I would have.

The shopping list is handled. Getting rejected by the robot checks was fair. The homework questions are still coming.

Updated: