Posts in this series will be tagged with the story badge. Planned topics include:
The agent is not a tool we use. The agent is a colleague who works on the business with us.
Coming up in the next story: We're releasing the entire sales agent profile as an open-source Hermes profile distribution. Every skill, every cron job, every template — with {{VARS}} placeholders so you can plug in your own company name, CRM webhook, and email address. One command to install, five minutes to configure. That's the whole point of this series: build it once, share it, and let everyone run their business on Hermes.
+Read Part 2 now: I built a Hermes plugin that runs my business — and then let Hermes finish it. The CRM, dashboard, and the workflow change that made everything click.
In the first post I said we were structuring everything as a reusable distribution. This post is about the step I took to actually build it.
+ +I created a Hermes plugin called derez-company. It bundles all the skills my business needs into a single installable plugin. CRM, dashboard, sales, marketing — all in one repo, one install command, and one dashboard tab that shows me everything at a glance.
+ +The repo is here: github.com/AquaMCU/derez-company
+ +The plugin has two live skills so far:
+ +Sales and marketing skills are in progress. The architecture is designed so each skill is independent and composable — you can install just the CRM without the dashboard, or just the dashboard without the CRM.
+ +I imported 70 leads into the Markdown-based CRM. Each one is a single .md file with structured YAML frontmatter. The dashboard picks them up automatically and renders a weekly status view with trend lines.
No SQL. No API calls. No database migrations. Just files in a folder that both I and my agent can read and write.
+ +Lesson learned the hard way: I suck at developing a Hermes plugin with z.dev and then importing it into my Hermes. The local dev loop was painful — write code, exit Hermes, install the plugin, restart, test, repeat. Every iteration took minutes. Mistakes meant digging through logs. It felt like I was fighting the tool instead of building with it.
+Halfway through building the dashboard plugin, I stopped doing it myself and changed the workflow entirely.
+ +I gave my Hermes agent write access to the GitHub repo and let Hermes build the plugin.
+ +Here's what that looks like in practice:
+ +This reversed the entire development flow. Instead of me learning the plugin API, debugging install paths, and fighting the dev loop — I described what I wanted in plain English and let the agent who already knows the Hermes plugin API write the code.
+ +The agent doesn't get blocked by z.dev documentation gaps. It doesn't need to restart and check. It writes, commits, pushes — and I just pull the result.
+ +The insight: The fastest way to build a Hermes plugin is to not build it yourself. Give your agent the repo keys and describe what you want. It knows the API better than you do.
+In the first post I teased that we'd open-source our sales agent profile. The plugin approach changes the plan slightly — instead of distributing a profile with {{VARS}} placeholders, the skills live in a plugin repo that any Hermes user can install with one command:
+ +hermes plugins install https://github.com/AquaMCU/derez-company.git+ +
The plugin is installable on any Hermes instance, including hosted agents on derez.ai. Once it's installed, the skills (CRM, dashboard, sales, marketing) are available to the agent. The data lives in Markdown files under company/ in the agent's home directory — portable, human-readable, git-friendly.
The CRM skill is live with 70 leads. The dashboard shows weekly progress with trend charts. The next step is wiring it all together:
+ +The CRM with 70 leads is the foundation. Everything else builds on top of it.
+ +Try it yourself. Install the derez-company plugin on your Hermes agent, or get a hosted agent at derez.ai and search for it in the skill library. The CRM and dashboard work out of the box.
++ View on GitHub → | + Get a Hermes agent → +
+