At Devfolio (a hackathon hosting platform and community), I work across support, operations, growth, and community. A large part of my work involves helping organizers set up events, make them understand platform flows, communicate with participants, and much more.
Support work in communities or companies is often treated as reactive work: answer the query, close the loop, move on.
But when you handle the same questions every day, the inbox starts becoming a map of repeated confusion, missing context, unclear workflows, and systems that do not exist yet.
That frustration led me to experiment with support workflows and automations, learning context retrievals and adopting open-source agent tools like Hermes Agent.
This talk is about how I made a system for myself, moving from grunt work to system work (a system that was not available internally before)
It solves one of the biggest problems, i.e., reduces repetitive effort, so there is more room for judgment, empathy, and effective community operations.
One workflow I built using Hermes helped triage support emails, pull relevant context, and generate first drafts for replies.
Hermes was useful here because it can persist context across sessions and turn repeated work into reusable skills.
The unexpected outcome was that this personal workflow experiment led me deeper into the tool, helped me share it internally, and eventually led to organizing an in-person co-building meetup called Vibe With Hermes Agent (Luma Link| Recap Blog)
This talk shares a practical operator framework: find the gap, build the first version, stay with it until it works, then make it repeatable.
It also shares what I learned from handling support and ops, adopting open-source tools, and building communities around the same problems I was trying to solve for myself.