hermes-agent – Agents & Automation skill for AI agents

Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent framework by Nous Research that runs in your terminal, a native desktop app, messaging platforms, and IDEs. It's in the same category as Claude Code (Anthropic), Codex (OpenAI), and OpenClaw — autonomous coding and task-execution agents that use tool calling to interact with your system. Hermes works with any LLM provider (OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, local models, and 20+ others) and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and WSL.

What makes Hermes different:

• Self-improving through skills — Hermes learns from experience by saving reusable procedures as skills that load into future sessions.
• Persistent memory across sessions — remembers who you are, your preferences, environment details, and lessons learned. Pluggable memory backends.
• Multi-platform gateway — the same agent runs on Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, Matrix, Teams, Email, and a dozen more platforms with full tool access, not just chat.
• Many surfaces — the same agent core drives the CLI, the Ink TUI, a native Electron desktop app, a web dashboard, and an ACP server for IDEs (VS Code / Zed / JetBrains).
• Provider-agnostic — swap models and providers mid-workflow; credential pools rotate across multiple API keys automatically.
• Profiles — run multiple independent Hermes instances with isolated configs, sessions, skills, and memory.
• Extensible & themeable — plugins, MCP servers, custom tools, webhook triggers, cron scheduling, skins that theme every surface, desktop UI plugins, TUI widgets, and pet mascots.

This skill is a hub. The body covers identity, quick start, spawning/orchestration, and hard invariants. Everything else lives in reference files — load the matching reference (below) before answering; do not answer detail questions from the body alone.

Docs: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/

Scope & Verification

This skill is a concise operating guide, not the complete source of truth for every Hermes feature. If a Hermes feature, command, or setting is not mentioned here or in a reference, do not treat that absence as evidence that it does not exist. Check the live repository and official docs before giving a negative answer.

Good verification targets, cheapest first:

• Every shipped feature, one line each: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/llms.txt. Start here for any "can Hermes do X?" or "how do I do X?" — it indexes the entire documentation set with a link to the page that answers. It is generated from the docs tree on every build, so it is never behind the product. Fetch it with web_extract, or curl -s https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/llms.txt when web tools are off. The whole documentation set in one file is at /docs/llms-full.txt.
• CLI commands: hermes --help, hermes <command> --help, and hermes_cli/main.py
• Source tree: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

Never answer "Hermes can't do that" from memory. Hermes ships far more than this skill body describes, and the index exists so a negative answer is always checkable.

Quick Start

# Install (shell installer — bootstraps PM, Python, dependencies, and the launcher)
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash

# Interactive chat (default surface; set display.interface: tui to launch the Ink TUI instead)
hermes

# Single query
hermes chat -q "What is the capital of France?"

# Setup wizard  /  pick model+provider  /  health check
hermes setup
hermes model
hermes doctor

# Other surfaces
hermes desktop                 # launch the native desktop app (alias: hermes gui)
hermes dashboard               # web admin panel + embedded chat
hermes proxy                   # OpenAI-compatible local proxy backed by your OAuth provider

Key Paths

~/.hermes/config.yaml       Main configuration (settings — never secrets)
~/.hermes/.env              API keys and secrets ONLY (under $HERMES_HOME if set)
$HERMES_HOME/skills/        Installed skills
~/.hermes/skins/            Custom themes (see references/themes.md)
~/.hermes/desktop-plugins/  Desktop app UI plugins (see references/desktop-plugins.md)
~/.hermes/tui-widgets/      TUI widget apps (see references/tui-widgets.md)
~/.hermes/pets/             Installed pet mascots (see references/petdex.md)
~/.hermes/state.db          Canonical session store (SQLite + FTS5)
~/.hermes/sessions/         Gateway routing index, request dumps, *.jsonl transcripts
~/.hermes/logs/             Gateway and error logs
~/.hermes/auth.json         OAuth tokens and credential pools
~/.hermes/hermes-agent/     Source code (if git-installed)

Profiles use ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/ with the same layout. When a profile is active, resolve the real home from $HERMES_HOME — never hardcode ~/.hermes.

Routing Table — load the reference for the task

| User wants... | Load |

|---|---|

| Anything not listed below — "can Hermes do X?", "how do I set up X?" | https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/llms.txt |

| Bots that chat, run routines, or message each other; the Bots tab | docs: /user-guide/bot-mode |

| CLI commands, subcommands, flags, "how do I run X" | references/cli-reference.md |

| In-session slash commands | references/slash-commands.md |

| Provider setup, API keys, OAuth | references/providers-and-models.md |

| config.yaml sections, toolsets, voice/STT/TTS | references/configuration.md |

| AGENTS.md / .hermes.md / CLAUDE.md project rules | references/project-context-files.md |

| Secret redaction, PII, approval modes, "reset permissions" | references/security-privacy.md |

| Delegation, cron, curator, kanban | references/background-systems.md |

| MCP servers (add, catalog, hermes mcp) | references/native-mcp.md |

| Webhook routes and event-driven runs | references/webhooks.md |

| A custom theme/skin ("synthwave theme", "change the gold ●") | references/themes.md + templates/skin.yaml |

| A desktop app UI element (pane, widget, ⌘K command, page) | references/desktop-plugins.md + templates/plugin.js |

| A live TUI panel or modal widget (ticker, clock, dashboard) | references/tui-widgets.md + templates/clock.mjs |

| Pet mascots — install, select, scale, diagnose | references/petdex.md |

| Windows-specific issues (keybinds, WinError 10106, BOM) | references/windows-quirks.md |

| Debugging: voice, tools missing, gateway, aux models | references/troubleshooting.md |

| Contributing code: adding tools, slash commands, tests | references/contributor-guide.md |

| delegate_task "capped at N" reports | references/delegate-task-concurrency-diagnosis.md |

| "Can app X use my Nous Portal subscription/OAuth?" | references/portal-auth-for-third-party-apps.md |

| Connecting a messaging platform (Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, …) | docs: /user-guide/messaging |

The reference list above is not the feature list — it is the set of topics that

need more than their docs page. For everything else Hermes ships, fetch

llms.txt and it maps the question to the page that answers it.

Two theming rules that hold even without loading the reference: you apply skins yourself (hermes config set display.skin <name> — every surface repaints live within ~a second; don't tell the user to run /skin), and to tweak one color, edit the ACTIVE skin (hermes skin set <key> <hex>) — never fork default, which drops the palette and resets the background.

Spawning Additional Hermes Instances

Run additional Hermes processes as fully independent subprocesses — separate sessions, tools, and environments.

When to Use This vs delegate_task

| | delegate_task | Spawning hermes process |

|-|-----------------|--------------------------|

| Isolation | Separate conversation, shared process | Fully independent process |

| Duration | Minutes (bounded by parent loop) | Hours/days |

| Tool access | Subset of parent's tools | Full tool access |

| Interactive | No | Yes (PTY mode) |

| Use case | Quick parallel subtasks | Long autonomous missions |

One-Shot Mode

terminal(command="hermes chat -q 'Research GRPO papers and write summary to ~/research/grpo.md'", timeout=300)

# Background for long tasks:
terminal(command="hermes chat -q 'Set up CI/CD for ~/myapp'", background=true)

Interactive PTY Mode (via tmux)

Hermes uses prompt_toolkit, which requires a real terminal. Use tmux for interactive spawning. Send the text and Enter as two send-keys calls: text and Enter in one call reach Hermes as one burst, and the Enter lands as a newline inside the message instead of submitting it. Both recipes wait for the ❯ input prompt (the default skin's symbol; use your skin's prompt symbol if you changed it) instead of a fixed sleep: a first start can take far longer than a few seconds, and input sent before the prompt is lost.

# Start
terminal(command="tmux new-session -d -s agent1

… (full content is in the download package)