One audit prompt cut 170M tokens/month: cleaning up Hermes agent cron jobs

toddhooper · x · 2026-08-26

@trevin shared how he audited the accumulated scheduled tasks in his Nous Research Hermes instance — he could no longer tell which jobs were useful, ran too often, or burned an expensive model on work a script should handle. The audit prompt has the agent do a read-only review of every cron job, covering model choice, deleting obsolete/duplicate jobs, right-sizing schedules, narrowing tool access, and deciding when to use no-agent mode.

Another user ran it and reported: 11 of 15 jobs were made deterministic, bounded and change-aware, cutting recurring agent usage by an estimated 170 million tokens monthly (over 98% vs retained pre-audit runs), eliminating duplicate alerts, hardening credentials, fixing scheduler accounting, and returning all 15 jobs to service.

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