Look around before you configure anything

Most install guides jump straight to "now get an API key." We're going to skip that for one step. Before you spend a cent or paste any credentials, let's walk around inside Hermes and see what's there. Five minutes, no signups.

Start it up

From any terminal, just type:

hermes

You'll land in Hermes's interactive chat. It might complain that no model is configured. That's fine — we're not going to chat yet. We're going to look.

Type a slash and press tab, or just type:

/help

This prints the full list of slash commands. It's long. Don't try to memorize it. Just skim it. Notice the categories: session management, configuration, tools, information, exit. Every category has a handful of commands. Later in this path we'll use five of them.

See what tools are installed

/tools

This shows you every tool Hermes has at its disposal. Reading files. Writing files. Running shell commands. Searching the web. Fetching URLs. Taking screenshots. Generating images. Running code in sandboxes. Sending Telegram messages. The list is long.

You don't need to understand what each one does yet. The point is to see the shape of what Hermes can do. This is not a chatbot — it's an agent with a toolbox.

See what toolsets exist

/toolsets

Tools are grouped into toolsets: web, terminal, file, browser, vision, image_gen, skills, and so on. You can enable and disable entire groups at once. This matters later when you run Hermes in different environments — maybe you want file and web access on your laptop but only web access when it runs on your phone.

See which models are available

/model

This shows you the list of providers and models Hermes knows about. Nous Portal. OpenRouter. OpenAI. Anthropic. z.ai. Kimi. MiniMax. DeepSeek. Your own custom endpoint. Pick whichever looks interesting — or don't, you'll come back to this command in the next step.

Quit for now

/quit

Done. You just explored a real agent without configuring anything.

Checkpoint — If /help, /tools, and /model all showed you content, you've confirmed Hermes is installed properly and you know where to look when you need to remember what it can do.