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by dandinu 42 days ago
Author here. This is a personal weekend project that grew into a working WhatsApp bot. It replies as me to two allowlisted contacts (myself + one friend who knew about the experiment). The interesting part is not the agent framework but the retrieval I eventually got the best results with: every reply gets generated by Claude after pulling 8 of my real past replies to that specific contact, filtered by recency.

Built on Hermes Agent + Baileys + Chroma + nomic-embed-text-v2-moe + Claude Sonnet 4.6 via Azure AI Foundry. About 2 hours of work plus an hour debugging a WhatsApp multi-device LID issue. Total runtime cost: ~$0.005 per reply.

The bot is not running on a dedicated number. It is hooked to my primary WhatsApp, which is a ban risk I accepted in exchange for being able to test with real contacts. The killswitch (Telegram command that empties the allowlist and restarts the gateway) takes about 10 seconds. There is also a hard kill: unlink the device from WhatsApp on the phone, ~5 seconds, severs the bridge session entirely.

Happy to answer questions.

1 comments

Why?

Technical curiosity?

I ask because this does not seem to be something to want to have.

That's a good question. It started off as pure technical curiosity (in the realm of: will this even work?). but as a side note, I always think of my screen time and the amount we spend chatting away on social media.

Obviously, this is probably and idea. I could imagine I connect my calendar to Hermes, and automate myself into 12 dinner plans and a trip to Disneyland on a Thursday afternoon just because I once mentioned I'm a Mickey fan to my nephew.

Correction - "Obviously, this is probably a bad idea."