hermes-agent

Overview

Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent made by Nous Research. It has a learning loop in which it creates skills on its own after finishing complex tasks and refines them as it uses them. It searches past conversations and builds an understanding of the user across sessions.

A single gateway connects a terminal UI, a desktop app, and Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal and email, so you talk to the same agent from anywhere. The model can be switched with the hermes model command among Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, your own endpoints and others, and it can run in several execution environments, including local, Docker, SSH and Modal.

It suits developers and practitioners who need an always-on personal agent that takes tasks over messaging apps and even runs scheduled jobs. The command execution environment can be separated into a Sandbox backend that supports container hardening and namespace isolation.

What it is used for

• Schedule daily reports, nightly backups and weekly checks in natural language and run them automatically.
• Assign tasks from Telegram or Slack to an agent working on a cloud VM.
• Spin up isolated Subagents to handle multiple tasks in parallel.
• Use tools such as web search, browser automation, image generation and TTS from a single agent.
• Generate and compress Trajectories in batches for training tool-calling models.

Pricing and license

MIT (free). Nous Portal paid plans are $20, $100 and $200 per month; model provider fees are separate

Getting started

1. On macOS and Windows, download Hermes Desktop; on Linux, macOS and WSL2, install with curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash.
2. Connect a model provider during setup.
3. Start a conversation in the desktop app or the terminal.
4. If needed, follow the documentation to connect messaging apps such as Telegram or Slack.

Links

Official site ↗Repository ↗

Related terms and companies

AI agent Agent memory Skills Subagent Sandbox Tool use

Sources

• NousResearch/hermes-agent README
• Hermes Agent — Open-Source AI Agent That Grows With You | Nous Research

Compiled from public sources (official pages, READMEs). Pricing and features change, so check the official site.