Token costs don’t just come from the prompts you write. They stack up from the ones running on autopilot, every 5 minutes, rain or shine, even when absolutely nothing changed.
u/JealousPlastic got tired of that and built hermes-watchdog: a plugin for Hermes Agent that monitors GitHub repos, RSS feeds, and websites in the background. Pure Python checkers. No LLM involved. Zero tokens burned while idle.
The twist: most monitoring setups fire a full AI call on every heartbeat. This one doesn’t touch the LLM at all until something actually changes. HTTP request, compare with last state, done. Nothing changed? Silence. Something changed? Telegram ping within 5 minutes. The agent wakes up exactly when it should.
How to wire it up:
- 🔧 Install it:
hermes plugins install LeventeNagy/hermes-watchdog && hermes plugins enable watchdog - 👀 Create a watcher:
/watchdog create my-watch --checker github --config '{"repos":["owner/repo"],"events":"prs"}' --action notify --deliver telegram --deliver-chat-id "YOUR_ID" --interval 5m - 📊 Check the dashboard: status cards per watchdog, history view with timestamps, toggle enable/disable per checker
- 🔔 Wait for the ping. New PR, new issue, new RSS entry, you hear about it. Not before.
Pro tip: Stack checkers and build a lightweight competitor intelligence layer. One watchdog on their GitHub for new releases. One on their blog RSS. One on their pricing page for content changes. The whole thing costs nothing to run while quiet.
Telegram is tested and working. Discord and Slack are in the code but not battle-tested yet. Worth trying if that’s your stack, open an issue if something breaks.
Repo is at github.com/LeventeNagy/hermes-watchdog. Issues and PRs open. 🚀
I built a zero-token watchdog plugin for Hermes Agent
by u/JealousPlastic in PromptEngineering