Built on Hermes Agent + Baileys + Chroma + nomic-embed-text-v2-moe + Claude Sonnet 4.6 via Azure AI Foundry. About 2 hours of work plus an hour debugging a WhatsApp multi-device LID issue. Total runtime cost: ~$0.005 per reply.
The bot is not running on a dedicated number. It is hooked to my primary WhatsApp, which is a ban risk I accepted in exchange for being able to test with real contacts. The killswitch (Telegram command that empties the allowlist and restarts the gateway) takes about 10 seconds. There is also a hard kill: unlink the device from WhatsApp on the phone, ~5 seconds, severs the bridge session entirely.
Happy to answer questions.
Technical curiosity?
I ask because this does not seem to be something to want to have.
Obviously, this is probably and idea. I could imagine I connect my calendar to Hermes, and automate myself into 12 dinner plans and a trip to Disneyland on a Thursday afternoon just because I once mentioned I'm a Mickey fan to my nephew.
Overall, even with a finetuning-as-a-serice like Tinker (the one from Thinking Machines) which is pretty cheap, the economics didn't work out that well.
Also, you probably one-shot this with Claude, I agree. But, you need to have an expensive Max subscription, which not everyone is willing to shell out 200 bucks for, just to have some weekend fun.
I was on the fine tuning team of a multi-team hackathon to make a specialized chatbot once a few years ago and despite working technically well our output had very little impact on end to end output.
