The departure board on my desk is great when I’m sitting at it. But the moment I actually need the information is when I’m getting ready to walk out the door — usually nowhere near the desk. So I added a second layer: proactive notifications on my phone.
The setup
I run Hermes agent — Nous Research’s open-source AI agent, in the same family as OpenClaw — on the Beelink mini PC. It’s scheduled to check in around the times I usually leave: once in the morning, once in the evening.
The clever part is presence. A timed reminder is dumb — it fires whether you’re there or not. So the agent checks Home Assistant’s presence detection first:
- Morning: if I’m home around my usual leave time → WhatsApp message with the train status. Delayed or not, that’s what I need to know.
- Evening: if I’m not home around the usual office-leaving time → same thing, other direction.
No presence match, no notification. It never nags me about a commute I’m not making.
Why an agent and not a cron job
Honestly, a cron job plus a script could do the timed part. What the agent buys me is the conditional logic in one place: check presence, check trains, decide whether to notify, compose the message — and the ability to change the rules conversationally later. “Also warn me about short trains” is a sentence, not a code change.
The WhatsApp delivery comes free with Hermes’s multi-channel gateway. No separate notification service, no extra app — the message just arrives where I already look.
It’s a small automation, but it’s the difference between information existing somewhere and information arriving when it matters.
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