Texting my Budget

Some random thoughts.

I'm working on a new quirky side project after killing ResumoFII and it's been invigorating to iterate on it using the latest tools available.

I've landed on a combination of Zed, Codex and an OpenCode Go sub for access to GLM 5.2. So basic model usage is GPT-5.5 (xhigh) for complex tasks and GLM 5.2 for fast iteration. Code reviews in Zed's branch diff viewer look especially nice. But I'll get back to this in a future post.

I actually wanted to write about Hermes Agent which has become a sort of operational command center for various aspects of my life like personal finance. I'm a fan of envelope-style budgeting, which is a technique where you plan out what your money is supposed to do for you each time you have income (salary, projects, whatever). Some years back I used YNAB for this but have since moved on to Actual Budget which is open source and cheaper to run. Props to YNAB for pointing out that too much of my budget was allocated to it for my liking.

I've mostly been using Actual Budget's mobile and desktop interfaces to manage my transactions and budgets, and that's been good enough. Now enter Hermes.

Hermes is an open-source self-improving agent with the kitchen sink built in. You plug in your own model subscriptions and connect to various services and tools. There is no built-in Actual Budget integration. But after some back and forth, Hermes created its own skill using the official Actual Budget Node.js client and could start interacting with my budget programmatically.

The fun part is that I can now simply text my budget via Telegram. Hermes comes with connection options including WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram and probably others as well. Since I'm already a Telegram user, I set that one up with a Hermes chatbot.

I can send a text message or a screenshot of a bank app notification, and it intelligently adds transactions to my accounts. I did not create any code for this, it's completely automatic and kind of mind-blowing. You can just create your own little super-custom personal finance tools for your exact workflow and use case.

When it gets things wrong, you tell it and it automatically fixes the underlying scripts to get it right the next time. To write this code by myself would be super tedious, I don't even care what the code looks like, I just care about the outcomes.

This is truly the age of bespoke software.