Ops & automation · Do this yourself

Build an agent that knows everything about your company.

✅ They launched Almanac (YC S26) from that experience.

No X data

Based on kushagrchitkar on Hacker News (opens in new tab)

Who it’s for

Owners, office managers and operations people who repeat the same tasks every week.

Adapt it to your industry

  • Restaurant: daily stock check and a supplier order list
  • Clinic or law office: intake forms summarized into a shared sheet
  • Agency: weekly client status updates drafted automatically

Step by step

  1. Pick one task you do every week and write each step you take, in order.
  2. Open ChatGPT, Claude or Grok, paste your list and the prompt below, and ask which steps an AI or automation can do.
  3. Create a free Zapier (zapier.com) or Make (make.com) account.
  4. Build the first automation: a trigger (new email, new form entry, new row) and one action (summarize, draft, add to sheet).
  5. Run it on 5 real examples and check every output by hand.
  6. Only after a week of correct results, let it run on its own, and keep a log sheet of what it did.

Ready-to-copy prompt

Using company docs and Slack, answer: what did we decide about [topic], when, and who owns it?

Start with AI

Opens the AI with this guide and the prompt filled in.

Open in ChatGPT (opens in new tab)Open in Claude (opens in new tab)Open in Grok (opens in new tab)
Cost
$0–20/month (free tiers or one AI plan)Our estimate
Time
2–6 weeksOur estimate

How to make money from it

Pricing idea: Offer to set up automations for a fixed project fee (for example $500–3,000), plus a monthly fee for upkeep.

Finding your first 10 customers

  • Automate one task for a friend’s business for free and measure the hours saved.
  • Share that result as a short case study.
  • Reach out to 20 businesses in the same industry with the same offer.

Ideas, not promises. Results vary.

Details: source, numbers and tags

What they did

kushagrchitkar’s team set up Hermes for their company so they could ask questions with full context, and found it very hard.

How it went

They launched Almanac (YC S26) from that experience.

Worth knowing

Context setup and permissions are the hard part.

Difficulty
AdvancedOur rating
Time to build
Not reportedOur estimate
Monthly cost
Not reported
Revenue
Not reportedWe only show revenue the source states
Engagement
59 HN points48 comments · fetched Oct 15, 2026
X buzz
No X data

Posted · Added Oct 16, 2026

Original builder recipe

  • Hermes or a similar agent
  • Connectors to docs, chat and tickets
  1. Write down the manual process step by step.
  2. Automate the deterministic parts with plain workflow steps or scripts.
  3. Use the model only where judgment is needed, with confidence checks.
  4. Add alerts and a human fallback.

Tags

Agent Hermes
Industry Software

Read the original

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