🤖 The Day My First AI Agent Got Stuck (And How I Refactored It)
This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry . When I started building Hermes Commander—my first autonomous AI agent—I had a simple mental model: "Task Prompt"⟶"Planner"⟶"Tool Execution"⟶"Result" Sounds easy, right? Not quite. 😅 Hermes started successfully, parsed the goal, and built an execution plan. I thought, "Okay, we're good to go." Then came the…
This story recounts the experience of building Hermes Commander, an autonomous AI agent. The author explains that initially, Hermes followed a straightforward process: receiving a task prompt, creating a plan via the planner, executing tools, and receiving results. However, the author soon encountered a series of failures.
The first issue arose when Hermes attempted to invoke a web search tool. The tool failed to activate in the system, prompting Hermes to enter a chaotic feedback loop. The system logged an error noting that the web_search tool driver was absent from the ToolRegistry. In response, Hermes' planner initiated a dynamic fallback, attempting to extract information through a command line interface (CLI).
The CLI executed a command to search DuckDuckGo for relevant frameworks about AI agents in 2026, but it returned unprocessed HTML content, yielding no useful tokens.
The author emphasizes that despite the cascading failures, Hermes remained functional and continued to operate within these limitations.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
