Five slash commands you will actually use

Hermes has a lot of slash commands. /help shows a wall of them. You do not need to learn all of them. You need these five, plus one command-line flag. Everything else can wait until you need it.

1. /new — start fresh

Long conversations get muddy. The context fills up with old stuff, the agent loses focus, you spend tokens on things it doesn't need to remember.

When that happens, type /new. It clears the session and starts a fresh one. Hermes will still remember what's in MEMORY.md and USER.md — those are persistent. But the in-memory conversation history is gone. Clean slate.

Use it any time you switch topics. Use it especially when the agent starts repeating itself or getting confused.

2. /model — change the brain mid-chat

You're in the middle of a conversation and realize you need something smarter. Or cheaper. Or faster. Don't quit and restart — just swap:

/model

This opens the model picker without killing your session. Pick a new one and keep going.

Use case: you start with a cheap model for simple edits, then switch to Claude Opus when you hit a hard bug. Or you use Sonnet for drafting and GPT-4 for final review. No restart required.

3. /tools — see what's on, turn things on or off

Forgot which toolsets are active? Type /tools. It prints the current state.

Want to enable a toolset that's off?

/tools enable web

Want to disable one that's in the way?

/tools disable browser

Useful when you're working in a sensitive environment and want to temporarily cut off shell or network access, or when you're debugging why the agent isn't using a tool you expected.

4. /save — don't lose your work

You had a great conversation. You want to keep it — maybe to share it, maybe to come back to it later.

/save

Hermes writes the conversation to a file in your ~/.hermes/ directory. You can read it with any text editor, share it, archive it, whatever.

Related: every session is also automatically saved to your local session database. You can find old ones with hermes sessions list outside the chat.

5. /help — the safety net

You forgot a command. You're pretty sure there's a thing to do X but can't remember the name.

/help

Don't read the whole list — search it. Look for the keyword you want.

Bonus: hermes --continue

This one isn't a slash command. It's a command-line flag for when you quit Hermes and want to pick up exactly where you left off.

hermes --continue

Or the short version:

hermes -c

This loads your most recent session back into chat. Everything Hermes remembered from the last conversation is back. It's the closest thing to "pressing play on yesterday's movie."

Checkpoint — You don't need to memorize these. You need to have seen them once. When you're in a session and feel stuck, the five commands above cover most of what you'll want. Everything else, skim /help when you need it.

That's it for Stage 2. You've installed Hermes, explored it, configured a provider, held a real conversation, and learned the basic controls. You have a working agent.

Stage 3 is about making this agent feel like your agent. Time to talk about personality, memory, and messaging platforms.