Make Your AI Agent Less Miserable
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TuneIn My AI agent could do useful work. The little things that made it frustrating to use kept getting in the way.
While setting up Milo, my Hermes agent, I kept running into friction: long silences, progress updates that just said “Python,” and no easy way to stop a long answer or get the agent into a conversation.
Each annoyance became one small fix: more useful progress updates, a Stop button, a Join button. The interaction got smooth enough that I wanted to use it regularly.
In this episode:
- Finding the little things that make you avoid using a tool
- Turning vague status messages into useful, sometimes funny updates
- Solving one friction point at a time
- Why your simplest useful fix may look different from mine
Try this with your own agent: “Here's the problem I'm trying to solve. What's the simplest fix?”
Less Miserable Tech is a podcast and field journal about real workflows: where they get stuck, what small fixes actually help, and how to make systems fit the people doing the work.
Website: https://lessmiserabletech.com/
Watch, listen and read transcripts: https://podcast.lessmiserabletech.com/
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I was setting up my own agent.
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So there's a framework called Hermes that you can put, uh, AI
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agents inside of, and it's a whole framework for managing stuff and doing
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things, and it's like, okay, great.
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I mean, I've been using AI for three years.
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We were on the b- we've been on the bleeding edge all the way up until now.
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And so I started setting up my agent, but I kept having all these little
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friction points, things that bothered me.
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It's like I got in Telegram.
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Okay, great, but you gotta press and hold to talk to it, and I'm driving.
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It's like, well, I don't wanna drive.
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Can… Is there more of an interaction we can just talk, right?
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And it's like, "Well, sure. You can do that in Discord." And I'm
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like, "Okay, great. Let's set up Discord." So that little pain in
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the butt, but I got it set up.
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And then it's like, okay, I can talk, but then there's these long silences.
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I'm like, "Ooh, are we still talking? What's going on?" 'Cause
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it's not interactive, right?
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It's not in the immediate.
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What, what happens is you, you tell Hermes, or in my case, I named him
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Milo, uh, you give him an instruction, and he goes through a series of
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steps to answer your question.
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He does an amazing job, and it has, it builds, uh, information
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about you and your problems and what you're working on over time.
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I have the archive of dubious certainty is set up for me
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that has all these, this data.
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I use Honcho for back-end memory, as well as this local stuff that it does.
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So it takes a while.
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So I said, "Well, can you at least tell me what you're doing so I
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know you're not dead?" Right?
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That the thing's actually working, 'cause sometimes tech fails.
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It goes, "Sure.
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Here's what I'm doing." And it literally said, 'cause it's running
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these things called Python scripts with code, and it goes, "Python Python.
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Python.
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I'm like, "Oh my God, can you please…" Oh, at first it was,
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"Terminal, terminal, terminal." Like, "Can you please tell me what you're
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doing?" He goes, "Python, Python."
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I said, "Oh, Milo, you're killing me here. Can we please, can you make it more
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interesting?" So I'm using Groq with a Q, which is a high-speed inference system.
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I'm using it to do quick analysis, to just give it the whole thread
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and have it give you back something to tell me about what's happening.
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And suddenly now I'm getting intelligent stuff, like when I do a long, a
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long text, it comes back and says, "Oh, I'm glad you took a breath."
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Uh, and it analyzes what I said, and then it tells me what it's doing.
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And when it's like, "Uh, running that search again. Hopefully we're gonna find
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something." You know, I'm, I'm chasing that down like a caffeinated truffle pig.
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You know, 'cause I have dry wit, I have a little bit of humor in it.
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It makes it fun.
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So while I'm driving along, I can do that, then all I have to do
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is unmute, talk to him, and mute.
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Well, then of course he goes on these long, long explanations, 'cause sometimes
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I'm using Codex subscription, which is actually GPT, and sometimes it can go
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very long, just like I'm doing right now.
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And it was like, "Okay, you're killing me here.
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How do I stop you?" So then I had to create a stop button.
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So now I have a stop button.
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It's like, well, then getting him to join the chat was difficult,
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so I have a join button now.
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And what I've done is each time a little piece of friction, things that made it
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difficult to use the technology to get what I wanted done, you identify it, and
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then you solve the smallest usable fix.
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Uh, uh, 'cause once you identify that problem, now you can solve that.
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And now of course I've done that- 20 different ways to now where I find
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a very smooth experience talking and dealing with, um, with, with Milo
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and my Hermes agent, and I'm able to do a lot of things now that make it
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super easy because I enjoy doing it.
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It-- the friction of the actual interaction is low enough that I
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use it regularly, where before it was a big old pain in the butt.
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By the way, I'm gonna a- create my own web app interface to make that even easier.
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Now, the lesson for most people is, like, your problem isn't my problem.
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Your goofiness… Like, I chose a very specific voice, and it was a
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voice that cost a little bit of money.
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It's from Groq with a Q. They have the best voice, in my opinion, for whatever.
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I needed that intonations.
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I needed its way that it said things and phrases.
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It made it more natural for me.
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And so by doing that, um, uh, again, I use it.
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Your issue's gonna be something completely different.
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Like, I've set up now these, these agents for two other people.
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They're using them completely differently than me.
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Their friction points are different, and they'll tell me, and I can
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help them out, or they tell their own agent, and he'll go fix it.
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So that's what you need to identify.
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What is it that slows you down and makes you go, "Ugh, I don't
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wanna do that." It's like, "Okay, yeah, I gotta go do that again.
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I gotta copy and paste 30 times, or I gotta go deal with this thing that
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I hate dealing with." And when you're able to, um, identify that, then we can
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help-- Not we, but you can figure out then, okay, how do we solve that best?
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What's the tool?
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What's the process?
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What's the thing that's gonna fix that thing?
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It's not about, "I created a whole new system. I created salesforce.com for
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myself. Isn't it amazing?" It's like, well, no, I solved the problem, and
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now I can move on to the next thing.
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And it's about making tech less miserable while using it and actually being
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productive and useful in solving things.
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And the same thing can be true for you.
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So, um, is this when I say leave a comment and subscribe?
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Like, I don't know.
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I'm just saying think about that and identify your friction,
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and the tool may reveal itself.
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Or just ask, "Here's the problem I'm trying to solve." Ask your own a- agent,
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"Here's a problem I'm trying to solve.
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What's the simplest fix I might have for that?" And then ask for a more
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complicated fix because sometimes they give you some really janky stuff.
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But it's like, that's okay, and now you're solving something that's real.
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Cheers.