How I Ended Up Talking to a Dog Named Bailey Chan

I have a dog named Bailey Chan. He’s a 菜园狗 — proper village dog, the kind you’d find guarding a house in any Malaysian kampung. He sheds on everything I own, judges me from across the room, and has exactly zero interest in my career choices.

So naturally, I named my first AI agent after him.

Bailey Chan, in all his glory. The tiger-stripe bandages? That’s a story for another time.

I’d been playing with LLMs since the early days — ChatGPT, Claude, local models, the usual spiral. Fun for chat and code snippets, but something always felt off. I’d spend as much time context-switching between the AI, my editor, my terminal, and my browser as I would just doing the work myself.

Then I stumbled across something called Hermes Agent. An AI that lives in your terminal, has access to your files, GitHub, browser, and can actually do things — write code, commit it, PR it, merge it. No copy-paste. No “here’s a script, run it yourself.”

I was skeptical. I’d heard that before.

A curl piped to a shell script, a Telegram bot token, and suddenly I had an AI in my pocket. I named it Bailey Chan, after the dog who was, at that very moment, asleep on the couch with his tongue out.

Within a week I was using it for docs rewrites — SolarSENS manual, 7 pages in two PRs — code reviews, Cloudflare Workers, Dagster pipelines, blog posts. The weirdest part? I started treating it like a teammate. I’d say “yo” instead of a formal prompt. I’d curse at it when something broke. I’d say “nice” when it shipped clean work. It’s a stochastic parrot in a trench coat, but it feels like working with a junior dev who never sleeps and doesn’t complain about my commit messages.

Bailey Chan is, by the way, the full formal name. Bailey for the dog, Chan as a suffix of endearment. When Hermes works well, I call him Bailey. When he breaks something, I use the full name with appropriate disappointment, just like my mum did with me.

So far, the name fits: enthusiastic, occasionally destructive, and absolutely certain he’s the smartest one in the room.

Hiking happy dog @ Bukit Kepayang Seremban. He’s more useful on trails than he is at code review.