How To Learn AI Agents From Scratch (Free, No Coding)

How to learn AI agents from scratch as a business owner is simple, because you treat the agent like a new junior hire and train it on one real job from your own week.

I'm Julian Goldie, and I run an SEO agency where AI agents handle a large share of the internal work.

This guide assumes you've never opened a terminal, you don't know what an API key is and you have about half an hour a day.

Here's the path I'd follow, in order.

Learn what an agent is, and pick one boring job from your business.
Install one agent as a desktop app, with no code.
Run three tiny tasks so you trust it.
Learn three words, which are model, provider and API key, and stay on a free model.
Hand over the real job, then put it on a schedule.
Save the job as a skill, so it runs the same way every time.

That's two weeks of work, and I've split it into day-by-day steps below.

What An AI Agent Is, If You Run A Business

A chatbot gives you advice, and an AI agent does the task.

The easiest way to picture it is a junior assistant who works from written instructions.

You give the assistant a goal, they make a plan, they use the tools on their desk and they come back with the finished work.

An agent does the same thing with software tools, such as web search, your files and a browser.

Like any junior, it's fast and keen, it makes mistakes and it gets much better once you write things down.

That's why this plan is built around one real job and not around theory.

The agent I use for the examples is Hermes Agent, which is free and open source from Nous Research.

Step One: Pick The Job Before You Pick The Tool

Most owners start by asking which tool is best, and that's the wrong first question.

The right first question is which job you'd hand to a junior tomorrow morning.

A good first job is small, it comes up every week and it can't hurt anyone if it goes wrong.

Here are honest starting points for six kinds of business.

If you are a...	A good first job to hand over	Why it's a safe start
Local service business	A weekly summary of your new online reviews.	Nothing is sent to customers.
Online shop owner	A morning brief on three competitor product pages.	It only reads public pages.
Agency owner	A first-draft outline for each new client brief.	A person still reviews it.
Freelancer	A tidy summary of a long client email thread.	It saves reading time and changes nothing.
Creator	Ten title ideas from your last video's transcript.	You still pick the winner.
Coach or consultant	A one-page prep note before each call from your own notes.	It stays on your computer.

Write your one job on paper before you install anything.

I'm not going to tell you what this will earn you, because I don't know your business and nobody else does either.

What I can tell you is that a job you used to do by hand every week is the fairest way to judge an agent.

🔥 Want my exact How To Learn AI Agents From Scratch setup, step by step? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom you get step-by-step video trainings, my installable Agent OS and four coaching calls a week with 3,400+ members building real automations. → Join the AI Profit Boardroom

Week One, Day By Day: Learn The Tool

Each day takes 20 to 40 minutes, and none of it needs code.

Day 1: You read the section above and write down your one job.
Day 2: You install one agent the easy way and get a reply to the word "test".
Day 3: You run three tiny tasks to see how it thinks.
Day 4: You learn what a model, a provider and an API key are.
Day 5: You confirm you're on a free model and pick a backup.
Day 6: You write a short note about your business so the agent stops sounding generic.
Day 7: You join one free community and post what you've done.

Day 2 in detail: the three easy ways to set up an agent

You only need one of these, and I'd pick the first unless something stops you.

Route	What you do	What it costs	Who it suits
Hermes Desktop	You download the official app, open it, sign in to Nous Portal and pick a free model.	The app is free, and a free model costs nothing.	It suits most owners on a recent Mac or a Windows PC.
Hermes Cloud	You sign in on the Nous Portal site, create an agent and pick a free model.	It's a paid hosted product, so check the current price on the page.	It suits people who want nothing installed.
The one-click Ollama route	You install the free Ollama app and paste one launch command.	It's free, with token limits on cloud models.	It suits people who don't mind one paste into a terminal.

You can get the app from the Hermes Desktop page.

On a Mac you open the DMG and drag Hermes into Applications, and on Windows you open the download with Windows App Installer.

The Mac package is for Apple Silicon only, so an older Intel Mac needs one of the other two routes.

Hermes Cloud lives at portal.nousresearch.com/cloud, and when I checked in October 2026 an agent needed a $2 minimum in credits or an active Nous subscription to deploy.

The video at the top of this page shows the Ollama route, and you'll find Ollama at ollama.com.

My best Hermes Agent setup breakdown compares the bigger setups for when you outgrow day two.

Day 3 in detail: three tiny tasks for a business owner

These three tasks are deliberately small, and each one shows you a different thing an agent can do.

Paste a link to a competitor's pricing page and ask for the five most important points in plain English.
Ask it to write a one-page checklist for onboarding a new customer and save it as a file on your computer.
Ask it to find three free tools for one task in your business, compare them in a table and recommend one.

The first task shows you the agent reading the web.

The second shows you the agent creating a real file, and you should read any permission request before you approve it.

The third shows you the agent planning several steps on its own.

If one fails, ask again in simpler words, because free models do stumble sometimes.

🔥 Want to learn this with people who run real businesses? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom, there are step-by-step courses on Hermes Agent and other agents, my installable Agent OS and four coaching calls a week. You'll be alongside 3,400+ members who are putting agents to work. → Get access here

Model, Provider And API Key, Explained Like A Staffing Agency

These three words scare beginners more than anything else, and they're simple once you see them as a staffing setup.

Word	The staffing version	What it means for your agent
Agent	It's the desk, the tools and the job description.	It's Hermes, the program you installed.
Model	It's the worker who sits at the desk.	It's the AI brain that does the thinking.
Provider	It's the staffing agency that supplies the worker.	It's the company that runs the model, such as Nous Portal.
API key	It's the keycard that lets the worker into your building.	It's a long password that connects your agent to a provider.
Tokens	They're the hours on the timesheet.	They're how providers measure how much you've used.

You can swap the worker without changing the desk, and that's the best thing about this setup.

Hermes Agent doesn't come with one fixed model, so you can change the brain in the settings whenever a better one appears.

You don't need an API key for this plan, because Hermes Desktop lets you sign in to Nous Portal directly.

If you get a key later, guard it like your bank login and never share it in a screenshot.

Using A Free Model Without Getting A Surprise Bill

The software is free, so the model is the only part that could ever charge you.

On day five, open the model settings and choose an entry that is marked free.

Some models appear twice, once as a free version and once as a paid version, so read the label before you click.

Free models come with rate limits, which means you may be asked to wait at busy times.

Pick a second free model as your backup, so a busy afternoon doesn't stop your work.

Free lists change often, so don't build your whole process around one model name.

When I recorded the video below, the free list on Nous Portal included Upstage Solar Mini 4 alongside several others.

My Solar Mini 4 Hermes walkthrough shows the exact clicks.

Week Two, Day By Day: Put The Agent To Work

Week two is where the agent starts doing a job you used to do yourself.

Day 8: You hand over the real job from step one and watch it run once.
Day 9: You put that job on a schedule, which makes it your first automation.
Day 10: You read the first automatic result and tighten the instructions.
Day 11: You save the job as a skill.
Day 12: You reuse the skill on a different customer, page or file.
Day 13: You take your biggest problem to a community or a live call.
Day 14: You decide what the agent's second job will be.

Your first automation

An automation is simply a job that runs on a timer without you asking.

On day eight, run the job by hand and keep adjusting the wording until the result is good enough to use.

On day nine, tell the agent when to run it, for example "Do this every weekday at 7am."

Hermes also has Automation Blueprints, which let you fill in a recipe if you'd rather not type the schedule.

Here's what a first automation could look like for each kind of business.

Business	A first automation	When it runs
Local service business	It writes a summary of the reviews you paste or point it to.	It runs every Monday morning.
Online shop	It checks three competitor pages and lists what changed.	It runs every weekday morning.
Agency	It turns each new brief in a folder into a draft outline.	It runs at the end of each day.
Creator	It turns your newest transcript into title and hook ideas.	It runs after each upload day.

There's one honest limit, which is that an agent on your laptop only runs while the laptop is on and the app is open.

If you need a job to run while you sleep, a hosted agent or a small server is the next step.

My best Hermes Agent use cases list has more automations with the real setup for each.

Your first skill

A skill is your standard operating procedure, written so the agent can follow it.

If you've ever written a checklist for a new member of staff, you already understand skills.

In Hermes, a skill is a folder with a text file inside it, and no code is involved.

After a job has gone well, type /learn in the chat and ask Hermes to turn the workflow it just ran into a skill.

You can also say it in plain English, such as "Save those steps as a skill called weekly-review-summary."

The next time you ask for that job, the agent follows the saved steps and doesn't start from zero.

That's the moment your process stops living in your head.

🔥 Want my working skills and automations to copy? The AI Profit Boardroom is where I share the Agent OS I run my own business on, plus the training to set it up. Bring your one job to any of the four weekly coaching calls and we'll help you turn it into an automation. → Join the AI Profit Boardroom

What You Do NOT Need To Learn Yet

A busy owner has no time to study a whole new field, so here's what you can ignore.

You don't need to learn coding, because everything here is typed in plain English.
You don't need fine-tuning, because good instructions and one skill do the job for most businesses.
You don't need vector databases, because a short note about your business is enough memory to start.
You don't need a team of agents, because one agent doing one job teaches you more.
You don't need a server, because your laptop is fine for the first month.
You don't need a paid model, because a free one is enough to learn on.
You don't need to compare ten tools, because the habit matters more than the brand.

Every item on that list is real and useful, and every one of them can wait until your first automation is running.

What It Costs To Learn AI Agents From Scratch

I'll only give you costs I can stand behind.

Item	Cost
Hermes Agent and Hermes Desktop	They're free and open source.
A model marked free on Nous Portal	It's free, with rate limits.
Ollama cloud models	They're free, with token limits.
Hermes Cloud	It's paid, and the current price is on its page.
AI Money Lab community	It's free to join.
AI Profit Boardroom	It's paid, and the current price is on its about page.

Your real cost in the first two weeks is time, and it's roughly half an hour a day.

How To Get Unstuck When The Agent Lets You Down

You will get stuck, and that's part of the plan.

First, ask the agent what went wrong, because it can often explain its own mistake.

Second, make the job smaller, because most failures come from asking for too much at once.

Third, ask other people.

My free community is AI Money Lab, and it's the right place for beginner questions.

When you want someone to look at your actual screen, the AI Profit Boardroom runs four coaching calls a week.

Ask a clear question, with what you tried, what you expected and what happened.

If you'd rather follow a full video first, my two-hour Hermes course is below.

A Short Glossary For Owners

Agent: An agent is an AI that takes actions to finish a job.
Tool: A tool is something the agent can use, such as web search or your files.
Prompt: A prompt is the instruction you type.
Memory: Memory is what the agent keeps between chats, such as the note about your business.
Skill: A skill is a saved procedure for one kind of job.
Automation: An automation is a job that runs on a schedule.
Rate limit: A rate limit is a cap on how much you can use a model in a set time.
Terminal: A terminal is a window for typed commands, and this plan avoids it.

Also On Our Network

FAQ: How To Learn AI Agents From Scratch

How can a business owner learn AI agents from scratch?

Pick one small weekly job, install one agent as a desktop app and spend half an hour a day for two weeks.

In week one you learn the tool, and in week two you hand over the job, schedule it and save it as a skill.

Do I need a developer to start using AI agents?

No, you don't need a developer to start.

Hermes Desktop installs like a normal app, and you give instructions in plain English.

A developer becomes useful later if you want custom tools or an always-on server.

What is the easiest AI agent to set up for a beginner?

Hermes Desktop is the easiest route I know, because it's a free official app and you sign in instead of pasting keys.

Hermes Cloud is the alternative if you want nothing installed, and it's a paid product.

Is it safe to let an AI agent work on my business files?

Start with jobs that only read public pages or files you choose, and read every permission request before you approve it.

Keep a person in the loop for anything a customer will see.

Will learning AI agents make my business money?

I can't promise that, and I'd be wary of anyone who does.

What you can measure is the time one automated job saves you each week, so start there.

Where can I get help if I'm stuck?

AI Money Lab is my free community for beginner questions.

The AI Profit Boardroom has four coaching calls a week if you want live help with your own setup.

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About Julian

I'm Julian Goldie, an SEO entrepreneur, author and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom, which has 3,400+ members.

I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation and SEO.

I started Goldie Agency on my own, and it is now a 7-figure SEO and link-building agency with 70+ people.
I've grown my YouTube channel to 400,000+ subscribers.
I wrote "Link Building Mastery".
My Udemy courses have taught 29,000+ students.

→ Get my best AI training inside the AI Profit Boardroom

Pick one job, train one agent on it for two weeks, and that's how to learn AI agents from scratch.