Hermes Agent Burned 603M Tokens Behind My Back — I Cut Background Costs by Up to 125x (opens in new tab)

Last Tuesday I noticed my Ollama Cloud Pro quota draining faster than usual. Way faster. I had burned through 603 million tokens in seven days without understanding where they went. I opened my Hermes Agent logs and found something I did not know existed: an auxiliary: block with twelve background tasks. Compression, web extraction, vision, session search, skills matching — all running silently every time I typed a message. Every task was set to provider: auto. And because I had no API keys f...