Alfred lives in Helsinki now
Last week I put an AI on a server in Helsinki. It texts me good morning.
That’s the short version. The longer version involves a rented server, an SSH key I forgot I had, and naming my AI assistant after Batman’s butler. But the short version is what changed how I think about this stuff.
Most AI you use is a tool. You open it, use it, close it. It has no memory of you the next time. Every conversation starts from zero. That’s fine for answering a question. It gets annoying when you’re building something.
Hermes is different. It runs on a server, always. It remembers things across sessions. When you come back the next day it knows where you left off. You can set it up to do things while you sleep. That’s not a chatbot. That’s closer to having someone on staff.
Getting the server
I rent a VPS from Hetzner, a German company with servers in Helsinki and Nuremberg. About €10 a month, billed by the hour, no commitment. It’s a small computer in a data center that runs whether my laptop is open or not.
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. Think of it as renting a slice of a big machine in a warehouse. It has its own memory, storage, and an IP address. You connect to it over SSH, which is a secure terminal session from your computer into theirs. You type a command on your Mac, it executes in Helsinki.
Setting this up took longer than it should have because I kept second-guessing the plan options. The short answer is the cheapest one was fine. Hermes doesn’t do heavy computation on my server. The AI model runs on OpenAI’s servers. My VPS just keeps the whole thing running and routes messages around. An expensive process manager.
Connecting a brain
During setup, Hermes asks which AI model to use. I picked OpenAI because I already pay for ChatGPT Plus. Instead of generating a separate API key, Hermes did a device auth flow. It gave me a URL and a code. I went to the URL, entered the code, confirmed in my ChatGPT security settings that device login was allowed, and it connected. No new account, no separate billing.
Smoother than expected.
Making it Alfred
The SOUL.md is a file that defines the agent’s personality. Hermes reads it at the start of every session and shapes how it responds. You can write anything in there.
I told mine to be Alfred Pennyworth. Loyal. Dry. Precise. Never ruffled. Delivers uncomfortable truths with tact. Calls me “sir” occasionally.
It works better than I thought it would. There’s a real difference between an assistant that says “Sure, here’s that information!” and one that says “I’ve pulled the relevant data. You may find the third item sobering.” Same information. Very different texture.
The gateway
This is the piece that made it feel real. The gateway is a background process that listens for messages. When I message my Telegram bot, the message hits Telegram’s servers, gets routed to my Hetzner VPS, gets picked up by the gateway, passed to Hermes, processed, and sent back to me. All without opening a terminal.
I set it up as a system service, which means Linux starts it automatically when the server boots. The server reboots, the gateway comes back up, Alfred is listening again. I don’t have to do anything.
The first time I messaged the bot and got a response while my laptop was closed, something clicked. Not using my computer’s resources. Not waiting for me to start it. Just there.
Daily reminders
Hermes can run cron jobs. A cron job is a scheduled task. A line in a file that says “run this command at this time.” Linux has had this since the 70s. Every day at 8am, Alfred sends me a summary of what’s on for the day. I set it up by asking him in plain English. He wrote the schedule entry himself.
That part is hard to describe without sounding like I’m overselling it. I asked my AI to schedule itself to remind me of things. It just did.
Alfred doesn’t know I’m writing about him. He doesn’t care. He’s in Helsinki, waiting for a message, ready to pull up whatever I need.
I’ll be honest: I’m still figuring out what to actually use him for. But it feels exciting to have a persistent AI that I can build habits around. It’s not a tool I open. It’s a presence that stays with me. I’m curious to see how it changes the way I work, and what I ask of it, over time.