Hermes Agent
Overview
Section titled “Overview”| Company | Nous Research |
| Type | Terminal TUI + messaging gateway + desktop |
| Pricing | Free — open source, bring your own model |
| License | MIT |
| Protocol | MCP, ACP, agent skills |
| Config Formats | AGENTS.md, SKILL.md |
| Repository | NousResearch/hermes-agent |
| Website | hermes-agent.nousresearch.com |
What It Does
Section titled “What It Does”Hermes is a self-hosted agent built around a closed learning loop. Where most agents start each session from nothing but your repo, Hermes keeps what it learns: it curates its own memory, searches its past conversations, and builds a model of how you work across sessions.
It is not tied to a terminal. Hermes runs as a persistent daemon on a VPS, a GPU box, or serverless infrastructure, and you talk to it from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, or the CLI through a single gateway process.
The Learning Loop
Section titled “The Learning Loop”This is the part worth paying attention to, and it is unusual.
- Autonomous skill creation: after a complex task, Hermes writes the procedure down as a skill — the steps, the pitfalls it hit, and how to verify the result
- Skills that improve during use: a skill is revised as the agent works with it, rather than frozen at the moment it was written
- Memory with nudges: the agent is periodically prompted to persist what matters instead of losing it at the end of a session
- Cross-session recall: full-text search over past conversations, with summarization for retrieval
The premise matches the case for skills generally. The first run of a new task is expensive because the agent has to work everything out; the second should not be. A skill is where that first run gets stored.
Key Strengths
Section titled “Key Strengths”- Model-agnostic: Nous Portal, OpenRouter, NVIDIA NIM, z.ai/GLM, Moonshot, MiniMax, Hugging Face, OpenAI, or your own endpoint — switch with
hermes model - Lives where you do: 16+ messaging platforms from one gateway, with voice memo transcription and continuity across them
- Runs anywhere: a $5 VPS is enough; it costs nearly nothing when idle on serverless
- Real terminal interface: multiline editing, slash-command autocomplete, interrupt-and-redirect, streaming tool output
- Scheduled work: cron tasks, so the agent does things without being asked
Trade-offs
Section titled “Trade-offs”- Self-hosting is the model, so you own the deployment, the keys, and the upgrades
- Broader in scope than a pure coding agent — strong at long-running personal and operational work, less specialized than a harness built only for repositories
- The learning loop needs time to be worth anything; on day one it knows nothing about you
Where to Find Skills
Section titled “Where to Find Skills”Hermes writes its own skills, but it does not have to start from a blank file. The largest open catalogue is atskills.one, with 60,000+ skills — see @skills for how referencing and saving work.
Best For
Section titled “Best For”- Long-running assistants that should get better at your work over time
- Teams that want the agent reachable from chat rather than only a terminal
- Self-hosted and privacy-bound setups
- Anyone who wants the agent to capture procedures instead of rediscovering them