Axel Verne
AI agents are only as good as what you ask of them.
I'm Axel Verne. I write short, field-tested playbooks for getting real work out of the Hermes agent — no hype, no 400-page theory. Free tips below; the full systems are in the books.
Three tips you can use in the next five minutes
The same principles behind the books — sized to fit in a coffee break.
Give the agent an exit
Agents fail loudest when forced to guess. Add one line to any task: "If the answer isn't in the provided material, say so instead of guessing." Hallucination drops immediately — and you find out what's actually missing.
Front-load the constraints
Don't bury the deadline, the format, or the word count at the end. Put every constraint in the first two sentences. Models weight openings heavily — the same request moved to the front measurably improves compliance.
Make it re-runnable
A good prompt is a tool, not a message. Save your best ones with placeholders — "Summarize {{URL}} in {{N}} bullets for {{AUDIENCE}}" — and reuse them. That's the difference between chatting and operating.
Get the 15-Minute Agent Setup Checklist
The exact 12-step setup that makes an agent useful on day one — exits, constraints, rails — in one printable page.
- 12 steps across honesty, obedience, leverage & rails
- Interactive — tick the boxes as you go, progress saved
- Free forever. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
The books
Both are instant downloads — PDF + EPUB, no subscription, no seat limits. Every future update lands free in the same files.
Hermes Agent for Complete Beginners
Zero to a running agent without touching a terminal. Install, first tasks, safety rails, and the ten workflows everyone should start with.
- PDF + EPUB, instant download
- Written for day one, not day one-hundred
- Free lifetime updates
58 Prompts for Power Users
The full playbook: 58 field-tested prompts organized by job — research, writing, code, automation — each with when-to-use notes and failure modes.
- PDF + EPUB + searchable Prompt Library
- Every prompt re-runnable with placeholders
- Free lifetime updates
The Complete Collection
Both books together, plus the searchable library of all 58 prompts — one purchase, every future update included.
- Everything in both books
- One download, all formats
- $8 less than buying separately
Prefer whop? The same books live at Hermes Agent Playbooks on whop — with a free prompt library post and the community alongside.
The MCP series
Same voice, new territory: Model Context Protocol — the standard that gives AI assistants scoped hands on real systems. One book for the budget meeting, one for the lab.
MCP for Business
Ninety minutes from "what is MCP?" to a 90-day plan you can defend in a budget meeting. No code, no jargon — the integration tax, the USB-C analogy, the five vendor questions.
- PDF + EPUB, instant download
- Facts checked against the official spec, Sept 2026
- Free lifetime updates
MCP for the Homelab
Teach your AI assistant to actually run your lab. First server tonight, the Paranoid Chapter, the error catalog, ten copy-paste recipes — and the repo is free and MIT either way.
- PDF + EPUB, instant download
- Read-only by default — yolo, but with a firewall
- Every chapter ends with Tonight's Homework
The Companion Repo
Ten MCP recipe stacks for your lab — filesystem, Docker, Home Assistant, Proxmox, Pi-hole and more. Smoke-tested: 12 passed, 0 failed.
- Two recipes run with nothing but Docker
- Same ritual every time: env, compose, stanza, ask
- MIT licensed, forever
What I actually run
I don't recommend tools I don't use daily. These are the picks that survived — each explained honestly on its own page.
⚙️ Hermes Agent
The agent the books are built around — local-first, scriptable, and the reason the prompt library exists.
🛠️ The official docs
Every install command and config option, straight from the source — the same references the books point to.
📚 The community & the lab
The Nous Discord for questions the docs don't answer, and Nous Research's site for where the agent is heading next.
Affiliate disclosure: some links on this site are affiliate links — if you buy through them, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only link tools I use myself, and my books never require any of them.