What you can actually do with it
Five real things people use Hermes for. Pick one and let it pull you in.
Abstract explanations of what an agent is will not get you excited. Real scenarios will. Here are five things people actually use Hermes for.
1. A terminal coding sidekick
This is the most obvious one. You're in a repo, something is broken, you type hermes and start talking.
Hermes can read your files, run tests, grep through the codebase, try fixes, and show you the diff before touching anything. It knows how to use ripgrep, it can run shell commands, and it can spin up a Docker container or an SSH session if you don't want it touching your local machine.
If you've used Claude Code or Aider, the pattern is familiar. Hermes is in the same family but with a broader scope — it doesn't only live in your dev workflow.
2. A bot in your Telegram
Run hermes gateway in the background and your agent shows up as a Telegram bot. You can send it text, voice notes, images, and files from your phone. It responds in the same chat.
Want it to summarize the news every morning at 7am and drop the summary in your group chat? You can schedule that. Want it to keep tabs on your home server and ping you if something goes down? That works too. The messaging gateway also speaks Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and email — one process, many front doors.
3. A voice assistant that doesn't suck
Hermes has a voice mode. Press a key, speak, get a spoken reply. Works in the terminal. Works in Telegram (send a voice note, get one back). Works in Discord voice channels.
The speech-to-text and text-to-speech are pluggable — you can run them locally if you don't want your audio going to the cloud. This is one of the areas where Hermes outshines most commercial products: it actually lets you keep the audio on your own machine.
4. A scheduled worker
Hermes has a built-in cron system. You tell it "every weekday at 8am, check my calendar, summarize my meetings, and send the summary to my Telegram." It runs that on a schedule, forever, until you tell it to stop.
This is where Hermes starts to feel less like a chatbot and more like a small digital employee. You're not asking it questions; you're giving it standing orders.
5. An agent with skills
Hermes has a skills system. A skill is a small package of instructions plus optional scripts and references that teaches Hermes how to do a specific job well — deploy to Kubernetes, open a GitHub PR following your team's conventions, generate a Pixar-style image, run an axolotl fine-tuning job.
You install skills from a hub, or write your own. Once a skill is installed, you invoke it with a slash command in chat. It's how Hermes goes from "generally useful" to "actually knows my workflow."
Pick one
You don't need to care about all five. Pick the one that made you lean forward, and keep that in mind as you work through the rest of this path. By the end, you'll have done at least a basic version of it.
Next: four words you need to know before we start installing anything.