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The 10 prompts every new AI agent owner should save.
A saved prompt is leverage: run it once, decide it's useful, never type it again. Here are the ten worth keeping from day one — five are free to copy right now, and five are power-user moves from the field-tested library, with just enough here to know whether you need them.
The free five — copy them now
All five follow the same pattern: role + specific input + hard output constraint. They're fully written out, no email wall, on the free page:
- The daily briefing — weather, calendar, and three headlines that matter to you, every morning.
- The priority setter — paste your to-do list, get told what to tackle first and why.
- The meeting prep assistant — a 30-second brief before any meeting: what to know, what to ask.
- The email polisher — professional but warm, under 100 words, every time.
- The structured research brief — what it is, what's new, what most people get wrong — under 400 words.
The five from the book — know these exist
These are the saves that separate an agent that chats from an agent that runs. Each one is verbatim in Hermes Agent: 58 Prompts for Power Users:
- The machine audit — has the agent inventory your hardware, environment, and tools so every later answer fits your actual setup.
- The token spend audit — finds whether you're paying API rates while a subscription sits unused, and where the tokens actually go.
- The memory audit — rates every saved memory as still-true / stale / too vague, and rewrites the set higher-signal. Why this matters →
- The skill library review — audits the agent's saved procedures so it reuses what worked instead of improvising from scratch.
- The weekly self-review — a recurring job where the agent reports what it did, what it learned, and what should change.
Frequently asked
What makes a prompt worth saving?
Reuse. If you'll run some version of it weekly — briefs, audits, format rules — save it. One-off questions don't need saving.
Where should I keep saved prompts?
One plain text file or note you actually see, each with a one-line "when to run this" note. Reviewing the list weekly matters more than which tool holds it.
Why do saved prompts have [brackets]?
Brackets mark the inputs you fill in — your city, your task list, your topic. They make one prompt reusable for hundreds of situations. See them in use →
The book gives all ten verbatim — plus the other 48, organized by problem: cost, memory, skills, security, and getting the agent to work while you sleep.