From the source
Or: How to get $1.8M of value from $19K of tokens TLDR: Hermes Agent autonomously plowed through about a million lines of unglamorous cleanup, freeing up Teknium and team to continue pushing features to users.
- We had long been putting off a thorough cleanup of Hermes, our open-source agent, because it meant taking engineers away from features and bug fixes.
- By September, the repository had more than a million lines of non-test Python. gateway/run.py alone was 34,847 lines long.
- I wanted smaller files, shared helpers, and fewer enormous functions to work through when something broke.
- On September 2nd, I asked my regular Hermes agent to do the cleanup.
- The main run lasted about nineteen active hours and dispatched 1,393 subagents, reaching 218 running at once.
- After a restart, a continuation session, and two rounds of community review and fixes, I merged the PR on September 4th.
- It reduced non-test Python source by 34.4%.
- The estimated model cost was about $19,300 for the main run, or roughly $25k including follow-up sessions.
- That excludes human review time.
- …