This post was originally published on my Substack publication as I Tested 6 AI Plans to Find What $5, $10 and $20 Get You.
A little while ago, I built a multi-step workflow in Hermes to generate a ten-page report that would get stronger each time it passed through the document. It checked the latest news, then read through Reddit threads, then cross-checked with X and also read through a bunch of internal documents.
For most of the run, it worked the way I wanted, and Hermes kept moving the file forward while pulling in the context it needed and holding onto the thread of the job.
By the time it reached the last stage, somewhere around the fourteenth tool call, it already had the material it needed and only had to stay coherent long enough to verify the details and write the final section cleanly into the file.
Then it just stopped in the middle of the edit. It retried enough times to trigger a context reduction right when the report needed the fullest possible view of everything that had already happened. The fact that I had to step back in and rebuild the whole thread was extremely annoying and the reason why I decided to write this article.
