Axel Verne → Free tips → Five to run first

Five to Run First

You just got an AI agent — or any local assistant — running on your machine. Now what? These five prompts are the fastest way to find out. No setup, no configuration, no code: copy a prompt, fill in the brackets, press Enter. Five more are waiting in the book.

Start with two or three. Don't read all five first. The point is to feel the difference between talking to a chat window in a browser and giving orders to something that lives on your machine.

Morning routine

1. The Daily Briefing

Give me a morning briefing: today's weather for [your city], anything on my calendar today, and three news headlines relevant to [your industry or interest].

Behind the scenes: pulls weather, calendar, and news into one short summary. Saves: 8–12 minutes of app-switching, every morning.

2. The Priority Setter

Here are my tasks for today: [paste your to-do list]. Help me prioritize them — what should I tackle first, and what can wait?

Behind the scenes: sorts urgent vs. important vs. deferrable, flags dependencies. Saves: 15–20 minutes of decision paralysis.

Work tasks

3. The Meeting Prep Assistant

I have a meeting about [topic] with [who] in 30 minutes. Give me a quick brief: key things to know, questions I should be ready to answer, and one thing I should definitely bring up.

Behind the scenes: gathers background, anticipates discussion points, structures a prep note. Saves: 20–30 minutes of pre-meeting research.

4. The Email Polisher

Rewrite this email to sound more professional but still warm. Keep it under 100 words: [paste your email]

Behind the scenes: rewrites tone without changing meaning, respects your length limit. Saves: 10–15 minutes of agonizing over wording.

5. The research assistant

Research [topic] for me. I need: what it is in one paragraph, the three most important recent developments, and what most people get wrong about it. Keep it under 400 words total.

Behind the scenes: structures a research pass and compresses it — no tab-juggling. Saves: 30–60 minutes of scattered reading.

Prompts 6–10

The book's next five cover the home-and-life and writing workflows: the meal planner, the trip outline, the unwrapper, the editor, and the drafter — each with its full copy-ready prompt and a behind-the-scenes breakdown of what the agent does with it.

They're all in Chapter 3 of Hermes Agent for Complete Beginners, alongside the install guide, the safety walkthrough, and the context that makes each one click.

The pattern behind all five

Describe what you need in plain language. Add the context that matters — budget, deadline, audience. Let the agent do the heavy lifting. The more specific you are, the better the result — but even a vague ask gets you most of the way there.

Where this came from

These five prompts come from Chapter 3 of Hermes Agent for Complete Beginners — the book that takes you from "I've never installed anything like this" to a working AI assistant on your own machine in one weekend. Every step's expected screen result, a plain-English glossary, troubleshooting for the five most common install problems, and an honest map of what comes next.

Get the book — $12 on Gumroad

Want to see the rest? Browse all 58 prompt titles in the searchable preview — the full copy-ready text of every one lives in the book.