What is Hermes Agent
An AI agent that lives in your terminal, grows with you, and actually gets things done.
Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent that runs on your own machine. You install it, point it at a language model, and it starts doing things for you — running shell commands, reading files, searching the web, talking to your Telegram bot, managing tasks on a schedule.
It's built by Nous Research, released under the MIT license, and written in Python.
Not a chatbot
If you've used ChatGPT or a web-based assistant, forget that model for a minute. Hermes is different in three ways that matter:
It runs locally. Hermes lives in your terminal, not on someone else's website. Your config, your memory, your skills — everything sits under ~/.hermes/ on your own disk. You own it. You can back it up, version it, move it to another machine.
It has hands. A chatbot can tell you what to type. Hermes can type it for you, check the result, and react. It can open files, run commands, spin up Docker containers, query APIs, hit webhooks. It's an agent, not a Q&A box.
It plugs into your life. Hermes runs as a daemon that connects to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, or email. You can chat with it from your phone. You can have it summarize your day every morning. You can give it tasks while you're walking the dog.
Bring your own model
Hermes doesn't come with a built-in brain. You pick which language model it talks to.
Out of the box it supports Nous Portal (made by the same team), OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, z.ai, Kimi, MiniMax, DeepSeek, and a long list of others. If you have a local model running with vLLM, SGLang, or Ollama, you can point Hermes at that too. Switch providers with one command — no lock-in.
This is a deliberate design choice. Hermes is the agent; the model is a commodity.
Who's this for
You'll probably like Hermes if you:
- Live in a terminal and want an AI that lives there with you
- Want to automate real work, not just ask questions
- Care about running things locally and keeping control of your data
- Have ever wished your chatbot could actually press buttons for you
You might not want it if you're looking for a polished consumer app with a clean UI. Hermes is a power tool. It rewards people who like configuring things.
What comes next
This learning path will walk you through everything you need to go from zero to productive. No prior experience with Hermes assumed. Expect about two to three hours total.
Next up: the kinds of things people actually do with Hermes.