Freelance Gig AgentFreelance Gig AgentFreelance Gig Agent
The agent scans the boards, scores what it can deliver, drafts the bids — you approve with one tap, it builds and ships the work.
One rule decides this whole architecture: “automation can prepare and support; humans must decide and send.” Upwork deprecated RSS specifically to kill auto-bidders, its API reviews every key and doesn’t allow proposal submission, and browser automation on a logged-in session is the fastest route to a ban. Freelancer.com, unusually, has a public API with real bid endpoints. So we build the compliant machine: full automation on Freelancer.com behind a tap-to-approve gate, and draft-only assistance anywhere else.
Winning gigs is drafting; delivering them is engineering. Hermes does both — proposal drafts scored against a capability profile, then actual delivery with its coding tools and parallel subagents. And its learning loop turns every won or lost bid into a better proposal skill.
The Stack
Write the capability profile
The agent must know — precisely — what it can ship to a paying stranger. This file is the difference between an agency and a liability:
---
name: capabilities
description: What we can deliver, at what price, and what to skip
---
## CAN deliver (bid confidently)
- Static & marketing websites (HTML/Astro/Next), incl. deploy
- Landing page copy, product descriptions, blog posts
- Web scraping & data-entry automation (Python)
- Spreadsheet automation, PDF/data extraction pipelines
## CANNOT (never bid)
- Mobile apps, smart contracts, anything requiring my identity
documents, video calls promised in the brief, design-from-scratch
brand work
## Red flags → skip silently
- Budget under $50 with vague scope, "easy job for experts",
client history of disputes, payment not verified
## Pricing anchors
- Landing page: $150–400 · Scraper: $100–300 · Copy: $0.10/wordWire the job scanner
Get a Freelancer.com API token (developers.freelancer.com — OAuth, and yes, it officially supports bid submission). Store it in ~/.hermes/.env as FREELANCER_TOKEN, then schedule the scan:
/cron add "0 * * * *" "Scan Freelancer.com via the API for new
projects matching our capability keywords (last hour, dedupe
against the pipeline file). Score each 0-100: skills match 40,
budget vs anchors 25, client quality 20, competition 15.
For every job ≥70: draft a proposal and message me for approval."Do not point this at Upwork. No API bid path exists, and automating a logged-in browser session there is behaviorally fingerprinted (submission speed, polling patterns) — bans rose 23% in 2025 and a suspended profile is unrecoverable income. For Upwork, the agent may draft proposals in its own workspace; you paste and submit them yourself in your own browser.
Teach it to write proposals that win
---
name: proposal-writer
description: Draft freelance bids that sound human and land
---
- Open with THEIR problem restated in one concrete sentence —
proof of reading, not "Dear Hiring Manager".
- Second line: exactly how we would do it (stack, steps, timeline).
- Include one relevant work sample link. Never more.
- Quote a specific price and delivery date from the anchors.
- Under 120 words. No exclamation marks. One question at the end.
- Track outcomes in the pipeline file: bid → won/lost → why.The approval loop
💼 Score 84: “Scrape 3 supplier catalogs into a master sheet, weekly refresh” — $250 budget, verified client (4.9★, 12 hires). Draft: “You need three catalogs merged into one clean sheet that stays current without anyone touching it. I’d build a Python scraper per supplier, normalize SKUs into one Google Sheet, and set a weekly auto-refresh — delivered in 4 days for $220, including a month of fixes if a site changes. Which supplier’s format is the messiest?” — Bid?
bid
Submitted via API ✓ ($220, 4 days). Pipeline: 3 live bids, 1 awaiting reply. I’ll ping you the moment the client responds.
Client messages always route through you — the agent drafts replies, you approve. Platforms (and clients) can tell when they’re talking to a bot, and the trust you’re selling is human.
Win → build → ship
This is where a Pocketcorp earns its keep: the same agent that won the bid opens its workspace and does the work. Websites get the full build-deploy-screenshot treatment; scrapers get written and tested against the real targets; copy gets drafted in the client’s voice. Hermes spins up subagents to parallelize — one on the scraper, one on the docs — while the main session tracks the deadline.
- Every deliverable lands in ~/gigs/<client>/ — inspect it in VS Code or the file browser before it ships
- You do final QA and upload the delivery — the client relationship stays yours
- Payment, disputes, reviews: human territory, always
Let losses teach it
A weekly cron reviews the pipeline file: win rate by job type, which openers got responses, which price points died. Hermes patches its own proposal-writer skill from the data — its learning loop applied to sales. Ten bids in, the proposals stop sounding like templates. Thirty in, they sound like the freelancer clients rehire.
What you end up with
A pipeline that scans hourly, bids only with your tap, builds the work in a real dev environment, and gets measurably better with every won and lost gig — your own AI agency with you as the closer.
