A few days ago I gave myself a weekend and an impossible list. Four neglected web projects, one cheap AI subscription, and the cheerful delusion that I would fix all of it before Monday. I wrote the whole thing up in Do What You Can’t, bugs included.
There was one dream from that weekend I never got to keep.
His name was Hermes.
Hermes, the courier who never showed
The plan was beautiful. I would tell an agent over Telegram what I wanted — “write something about the October tides” — and it would draft a proposal. I would glance at it on my phone, tap approve, done. A self-maintaining little colleague who sent me good ideas while I did literally anything else.
The Hermes plan got me surprisingly far — further than it had any right to. And then the credits ran out.
I assumed that was the end of it.
Then Jette showed up instead
Here is the thing nobody tells you about wanting a robot assistant. You do not actually want a robot assistant. You want the work to be easier in the place where you already do the work.
So instead of a courier living on Telegram, the assistant moved into the CMS itself. Right where the posts already are. She has a name — Jette — and she does three things on this system: she writes, she researches, and, slightly absurdly, she is the one who built most of the thing you are reading this in.
Yes. The AI that drafts the posts also wrote the code that lets the AI draft the posts. I have stopped trying to find the bottom of that sentence.
How it actually works
It works like a conversation, not a vending machine. I open a post and drop my notes into a tab — bullet points, half-thoughts, the one decent sentence I had in the shower. I hit analyze, and instead of immediately spraying eight hundred words at me, Jette reads what I gave her and asks three or four actual questions. What angle? Who is this for? Is this the cycling one or the ferry one?
I answer in plain language. Then she writes the draft — in my voice, because she already knows my voice.
That last part is the trick. She is not guessing. There is a small library of prompts behind her: a persona, a writing style, the editorial rules for each site. And they are not buried in code where only weekend-me could find them. They are editable, like everything else. When I decide I have been leaning on a word too hard, I change the rule, not the source.
Hermes was supposed to bring me ideas. Jette brings me drafts I can argue with. Better deal.
The part where she makes the pictures too
Then there is the image side, which I genuinely did not expect to enjoy this much.
Same post, different tab. Jette reads the article and writes her own image prompt, applying a house illustration style so everything stays in the same visual family — instead of looking like four different stock libraries had an argument. I pick a model, tweak the prompt if I am feeling opinionated, and the hero image appears right there.
And she remembers people. I can hand her a reference photo — me, for instance — and she keeps that face consistent across posts instead of inventing a new stranger every time. Every version she generates is kept in a little history strip, so when version three turns out worse than version two, I just click back. The image that shows up when someone shares a link even defaults to the hero on its own, so it is never an empty grey box.
None of this needed a Telegram bot.
So, is it the dream?
No. Let me be honest. Hermes promised me a phone that buzzed with ideas while I got on with my life. Jette does not buzz. She does not message me. She has the social initiative of a brick — by design.
She is also much cooler than Hermes ever was.
Because a courier that pings you proposals is a lovely fantasy right up until you notice what you actually wanted: to sit down, write three messy lines, and have the boring eighty percent handled — the questions, the first draft, the image, the SEO title you always forget — without ever leaving the page. The Telegram part was never the point. It was just the part that sounded futuristic.
There is one more thing I like, and it is not really a feature. Every post says who did what — which words were mine, which were hers. Partly that is the EU AI Act. Mostly it is just honest. Jette does not live hygge. She simply understands it, because I taught her. That feels like the right amount of credit for both of us.
Hermes is still asleep. I have stopped trying to wake him. I have Jette now, and she was never going to text me anyway.