I have realised that many of you guys are students, so I figured I would share what has helped me as a student.

If you don't know me yet:

I am Holme Bengt. I have been obsessed with starting a company for 4 years. Tried a lot of stuff, merch, web design, copywriting, and now AI agents and workflows. Last March I also started my first semester of business school or how we call it where I live, BWL Studium. I have never been a great student, I actually did not even go to college/ Gymnasium. I started my journey as an industrial mechanic milling large gears for industrial gearboxes. But I thought that can't be life, that can't be it. I want to start a company so bad that i read business books in the night shift next to my milling machine. since then i have been running a company on the side with various projects for 4 years.



Why am I telling you this? To give you an idea of my workload and that i am not the perfect student. and the stuff I have to get done day in and day out. And still I have enough time to do sports, watch movies with my GF, and do some repairs on my old Mercedes. All while being a bad student.



If these techniques have helped me to successfully pass my first semester this will work for all of you even better because realistically most of you are smarter and better learners than I am. I learned only the essentials.



here are all my tips on how to use AI in general and your Hermes / openclaw agent to help you as a student:



Tip 1:

Put all study materials, books, scripts, old exams into NotebookLM and let NotebookLM create a learning plan putting the emphasis on which topics were most used in the old exams, which are your teachers favourites. Try to learn the basics and the favourites of your teacher at the start of the semester.



Tip 2:

Use Hermes to create Anki flashcards. Don't get me wrong, I hate AI slop and please do yourself a favour and don't just give Hermes a huge chunk of material and tell him to handle it. You have to manually go through the material and think about what is truly useful and needed. But you can create a one time blueprint for your perfect Anki card and then use Hermes to effortlessly create a perfect Anki card in the exact same style and with the same explanations and format every time you need one. thats a huge time saver.



Tip 3:

I use Hermes to locally host a quiz website. Since Hermes in my case is running on its own Mac Mini connected to my other devices with Tailscale (free, VPN network between your devices) I can visit those local sites from all my devices and everywhere. I use this to spin up learning sites my Hermes agent creates for me, like an English grammar quiz asking me what tense I should use in this phrase or to fill in the right verb.



tip4: 

Using Hermes to give me an evening recap of my study time using the free app Toggl Track. It can also search my calendar and see how far the exam is out and if I am on track looking at my Notion learning plan and which topics I should grasp before the exam.



tip5: 

Using Hermes to save you time. My best example is using Hermes to set up a one time time saving automation. Every time I got a receipt I should log for my tax authority I had to manually save it and enter it into a Notion database for later export. Now I had Hermes whip up an automation which saves me 5 minutes every time I get a receipt.



here a quick cost advice for students:



The funny part: I pay about the same as a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, sometimes even less, but I have no rate limits. I spend about $22 a month.



I keep it cheap by using DeepSeek V4 Flash directly from DeepSeek (not OpenRouter), setting a 1300 character memory limit, cutting tool bloat in cron jobs, and telling Hermes to make itself cheaper. Each change saves 10-20%. Together they save a lot.



I wrote a full breakdown of how I reduced my cost from 40€ to 21€ on my blog here: [https://blog.holmebengt.com/post.html?id=cost-optimization](https://blog.holmebengt.com/post.html?id=cost-optimization)

How to Use Hermes Agent as a Student (From a bad learner who just passed first semester)