I've been running Hermes Agent 24/7 for months. This is everything I learned: installation, models, use cases, the dashboard 99% of people use wrong, self-improvement, security. All of it.
Bookmark this. You'll need it when you start building.
Table of Contents
- What Hermes Agent Actually Is
- Hermes vs OpenClaw vs Claude Code
- Installation
- Model Selection — What to Use for What
- Messaging Platform
- First Things to Do
- The Dashboard
- Use Cases
- Self-Improvement — The Actual Edge
- Security
- Appendix: Complete Command Reference
LAYER 1 — WHAT HERMES AGENT ACTUALLY IS
Hermes Agent is a 247 autonomous AI employee built by Nous Research.
An agent that works while you sleep, proactively figures out tasks aligned with your goals, and gets better every single session.
Three things separate it from everything else:
Memory. Everything lives in markdown files on your computer — not in the cloud, not in a black box. On your machine. You can read it, edit it, delete it. Full transparency.
Self-improvement. Every task it completes, it reviews. What worked. What didn't. How to do it better next time. It edits its own skills after every session.
Session recall. Every conversation you've ever had is logged with FTS5 full-text search and LLM summarization. Ask it what you talked about 3 months ago. It knows.
LAYER 2 — HERMES vs OPENCLAW vs CLAUDE CODE
Three tools. Three different jobs. Here's where each one fits.
Hermes vs OpenClaw
OpenClaw has gotten bloated. Feels slow. And the updates break it — every single one. For someone who lives with AI agents, that's painful. For someone newer to agents, it's a dealbreaker.
Hermes is lighter, snappier, and updates don't destroy your setup. That reliability alone is the reason to switch right now.
Additional Hermes advantages:
- Built-in multi-agent via Kanban (v0.12.0+) — agents claim tasks from a board, work in parallel, hand off when blocked
- Nous Portal with curated models built in
- 166 tracked skills (87 bundled + 79 optional) across 26+ categories
- 20+ messaging platforms: Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix, Teams, and more
Hermes vs Claude Code vs Codex
Different tools. Different jobs. Use both.
Hermes = your general purpose employee. Day-to-day tasks. Research. Documents. Spreadsheets. Computer administration. Business advisor. Prototypes. Everything that needs to continuously improve over time. Think of it as your Chief of Staff.
Claude Code / Codex = deep focused vibe coding sessions. Large-scale complex applications. End-to-end testing. Two windows open side by side. You're locked in. That's when you reach for Claude Code or Codex.
Hermes handles everything else so you can go deep when you need to.
LAYER 3 — INSTALLATION
One command. That's it.
Linux / macOS / WSL2:
Windows (native, PowerShell) — early beta:
Android (Termux): same curl one-liner as Linux — installer auto-detects Termux.
After install, start with:
Quick setup walks you through model selection and messaging platform.
If you have OpenClaw installed: you'll get an option to import memories. Recommendation: start clean. Two separate agents with separate memories and skills is better than merging everything.
LAYER 4 — MODEL SELECTION
Three tiers. The right choice depends on what you're doing, not just budget.
Expensive — claude-opus-4 / claude-sonnet-4
Best for: complex reasoning, long /goal tasks, nuanced writing, business advisor role. Claude handles ambiguity better than any other model. When Hermes needs to make judgment calls mid-task — opus-4. When you want speed with 90% of opus quality — sonnet-4.
One catch: Anthropic disabled OAuth for agents. API key required — you pay per token. Budget: a few hundred dollars a month with heavy use.
Moderate — GPT-5.5
Best for: coding tasks, prototyping, budget-conscious daily driver. GPT-5.4 and earlier were nearly useless inside agents. GPT-5.5 changed that. Works with your existing $20/month ChatGPT subscription. Way more usage than Anthropic at a fraction of the cost.
Start here if you're new to Hermes. Switch to Claude once you know what tasks need the upgrade.
Affordable — Qwen 3.7 Max, Grok, Nous Portal
Qwen 3.7 Max — best for long-horizon autonomous tasks. 35 hours continuous execution, 1,000+ tool calls without losing context. Top model in OpenRouter's curated picker (PR #32809). Use via OpenRouter ($0 per token on free tier up to limits).
XAI Grok — best if you already pay for SuperGrok. OAuth works. Strong on X-related tasks and research. Pairs well with xurl skill.
Nous Portal — $20/month flat, curated models, built by the Hermes team. Starting point for anyone who wants one bill and no API key management.
Task-to-model quick reference
Switch models anytime:
No code changes, no reinstall. Different profiles can run different models simultaneously.
LAYER 5 — MESSAGING PLATFORM
Telegram. Set it up. Don't overthink this.
Telegram is the only messaging platform actively building for AI agents. Topics. Agent-to-agent communication. Constantly adding features. Free.
Setup: Hermes walks you through it during install. Copy a token from Telegram's BotFather into Hermes. Done. Five minutes total.
Other supported platforms if you need them: Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix, Mattermost, Email, SMS, DingTalk, Feishu, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and more. 20+ total from one gateway process.
LAYER 6 — FIRST THINGS TO DO
Day one with a new employee: you tell them who you are.
Step 1: Tell Hermes about yourself
Send this as your first message (fill in your details):
This goes into memory. Every proactive task Hermes does from now on is filtered through these goals. Skip this step and it's working blind.
Step 2: Set up your first cron job
Cron jobs are scheduled autonomous tasks. Plain English. No code.
Wake up every morning with something new built for you. That's your agent working.
Step 3: Learn /goal
/goal is the most powerful command in Hermes. It turns the agent from reactive chatbot into a background worker. You set an objective, Hermes breaks it into tasks, executes autonomously, and continues until done.
Core /goal commands:
For the complete /goal guide including 21 copy-paste workflows for research, sales, content, email, ops, and dev → The Complete Hermes /goal Playbook
For a deep dive on writing strong goals, max_turns config, and avoiding the most common mistakes → Hermes /goal — The Full Guide
LAYER 7 — THE DASHBOARD (99% USE IT WRONG)
Opens in browser at localhost:9119.
Open the Skills tab first. That's where the real value is.
Models tab
Swap models instantly. No terminal needed. Set different models per profile.
Cron tab
See all scheduled tasks. Create complex ones manually here with more control than typing in Telegram.
Skills tab
Every skill Hermes has learned is here. Browse, toggle on/off, read the markdown.
A well-used agent: 150+ skills. It knows your specific workflows by name. It can do things you never explicitly taught it because it learned from watching you.
Built-in skills you should turn on immediately:
- Browser automation — lets Hermes crawl the web, extract data, interact with pages
- Computer use — lets Hermes control your screen, move files, open apps
- Image generation — connects to OpenAI or Grok image models, generates assets mid-task
- Video generation — generates videos directly from your conversations
Plugins tab
Extra capabilities via API keys. Turn on browser-use, fire-crawl, computer-use. Add any API key you already have to extend what Hermes can do.
Profiles tab
This is multi-agent setup.
One profile = one Hermes agent with its own memories, skills, and model. Create multiple profiles for different roles: Chief of Staff, Head of Content, Research Agent, DevOps Engineer.
Run them simultaneously. Each specialised. Each improving independently.
Kanban board — the most powerful screen
How to use it correctly:
Every morning, write down your to-do list. Take every task an AI agent can handle. Drop it into Triage. Walk away. Make breakfast.
What happens automatically:
- Hermes takes each task from Triage
- Splits it into subtasks
- Moves to To-Do
- Assigns subtasks to sub-agents
- They execute in parallel
By the time breakfast is done, half your to-do list is finished.
Statuses: Triage → To-Do → Ready → In Progress → Blocked → Done
The daemon runs continuously (v0.16+), checking for new tasks every 60 seconds. No cron-based polling, no wasted tokens between tasks.
LAYER 8 — USE CASES
1. Daily Tutor
Found a useful YouTube video? Don't just watch it and forget it.
Check this video out. Read the transcript. Then every morning at 8am remind me of a concept or two from the video, then quiz me on it. [paste YouTube link]
Hermes pulls the transcript, extracts 10 key concepts, schedules a cron job. Every morning at 8am: lesson + quiz delivered to Telegram.
Use this for every educational video you watch. You stop forgetting everything.
2. Computer Administrator
Install Tailscale (free) on all your devices. Now Hermes can move across every machine you own.
On your phone, anywhere in the world:
Get me the agent.md file from my Mac Studio and drop it on my MacBook Pro.
Done. Any file. Any device. No SSH, no Google Drive, no manual transfer.
Also works for developers: test local hosts running on other machines without being physically at that computer.
3. Session Recall
Remind me of every business idea we discussed last month.
Every conversation logged. Every idea you dropped in — recalled on demand. What links you shared 2 months ago. What you were building 3 months ago.
No other AI agent has this. FTS5 full-text search with LLM summarization across your entire history.
4. X Content Workflow with xurl
xurl is a Hermes skill that gives your agent direct access to X — searching posts, reading discussions, publishing content.
On its own it's an execution tool. Combined with /goal, research skills, and memory it becomes a recurring content system.
The workflow that works:
hermes goal "Every morning and evening, research the latest AI agent discussions, analyze against my content style, check previously published topics, generate a thread, evaluate virality score, and publish via xurl if it passes the bar."
Structure it in stages: Data Collection → Style Check → Repetition Check → Draft → Quality Score → Publish decision.
Key mistake: don't let it publish automatically on day one. Review outputs manually for 5-7 runs first.
For the complete xurl + /goal workflow with step-by-step setup → How to Make Hermes + xurl Actually Work as a System
5. Mission Control
Ask Hermes to build you a custom dashboard:
Build out a mission control for me where we can add tools to improve our workflows. Start with: - A content pipeline where I can add ideas and you move them forward - A memory wiki showing everything we've worked on - A docs page showing every artifact we've created
No code required. Describe what you want. It builds it.
Add tools as you need them. Your dashboard becomes a custom interface built for how you work.
6. Prototype Builder
At the gym. Get an idea. Pull out Telegram.
Build me a landing page for [idea]. One page. Hero section, 3 features, pricing, CTA. Deploy to localhost. Send me the link.
Come back in an hour. Prototype is ready.
Hermes knows your stack from memory. It doesn't ask what framework you use. It uses what you always use.
7. Business Advisor
I'm thinking about [decision or problem]. Here's the context: [paste context]. What are the 3 strongest arguments for and against? What would you do?
Unlike ChatGPT, Hermes knows your business, your goals, your constraints. The advice is filtered through your actual situation, not a generic framework.
8. Overnight /goal Runs
Give Hermes a complex task before bed.
/goal build a competitor research report on [competitor 1], [competitor 2], [competitor 3]. Cover: pricing, feature set, content strategy, top performing posts last 30 days, estimated team size, recent funding or news. Format as a structured markdown doc. Save to file.
Wake up with a research report that would take a human analyst a full day.
Works for: code refactoring, database migrations, full app builds, SEO audits, content calendars.
Set max_turns higher for complex overnight tasks:
Default is 5-10. Raise it only when the task genuinely needs more steps:
Don't go higher without a reason. Every turn costs tokens.
9. Multi-Agent Org Chart
Multi-agent is where the org chart becomes real.
Create separate profiles for each role:
Profile: Chief of Staff soul.md: You coordinate all other agents. Morning brief at 7am. Delegate research to Head of Research. Delegate content to Head of Content. Report back with merged summary.
Profile: Head of Research soul.md: You find information. Monitor X for top posts in [niche]. Track competitor activity. Send weekly intelligence brief.
Profile: Head of Content soul.md: You produce content. Draft posts based on research briefs. Repurpose articles into 5 formats. Maintain content calendar.
One morning brief in Telegram. Multiple agents working in parallel. You read the output.
LAYER 9 — SELF-IMPROVEMENT (THE ACTUAL EDGE)
The self-improvement loop is what no other agent has.
The loop:
- You give Hermes a task
- It executes
- After completion, it reviews: what worked, what didn't, optimal path
- It saves that as a skill in ~/.hermes/skills/
- Next time you give it the same task, it uses that skill directly
You correct it once. It never makes that mistake again.
Six months in, it knows your work better than a human assistant would:
- How you like things formatted
- Which tools work for your specific workflows
- What tone you prefer in different contexts
- Which shortcuts to take and which to avoid
Skills are transparent. They live as markdown files on your computer. You can open them, read them, edit them. No black box.
Updates add new skills automatically. Computer use. Video generation. Qwen 3.7 Max support. Every update from Nous Research extends what it can do without breaking what already works.
To see all available tools and configure them:
Turn on immediately: browser-automation, computer-use
LAYER 10 — SECURITY (THE HONEST TAKE)
Security concerns with Hermes are vastly overrated for basic use.
It only does what you tell it to do.
Ask it to build a presentation — it builds a presentation. It does not then open your photos folder. Ask it to check a score — it checks the score. It does not leak your messages anywhere.
The only catastrophic security event possible is if you tell it to do something catastrophic. Think before you prompt. That's the basic security model.
What you don't need for personal use:
- A separate iCloud account
- A dedicated Google account
- A VPS (VPS recommendations from AI YouTubers are sponsored content — they don't use them themselves)
What you do need:
- Common sense
- Reviewing prompts before hitting enter on anything destructive
- The ground rule in your soul.md: "Never send money to anyone without explicit confirmation"
Install it on your main computer. Use good judgment. That's it.
If something breaks: open the Hermes folder in Claude Code or Codex, say "I have this problem, please fix it." Solves 100% of issues.
For production agents that touch sensitive systems, Hermes ships a proper security stack:
Layer 1 — Bitwarden Secrets Manager (credential management)
One bootstrap token in .env. All real credentials live in Bitwarden. Every Hermes instance pulls secrets at startup. Rotate a key once in the web app — every instance picks it up on next restart. Instant revocation from the web UI. Free tier.
Layer 2 — iron-proxy egress firewall (credential protection)
Instead of injecting real credentials into the sandbox, Hermes gives the agent opaque proxy tokens. iron-proxy intercepts at the network boundary, swaps for the real credential, forwards the request. The sandbox never holds the actual key. Compromise the sandbox — the attacker gets tokens that only work from behind the proxy.
The two layers compose: rotate in Bitwarden, propagates to all sandboxes automatically. One action in a web UI, full propagation across the fleet.
For the full architecture breakdown including how this compares to CrewAI, LangGraph, and LangChain → Hermes x Bitwarden — The Security Stack AI Agents Actually Need
The Real Insight
ChatGPT and Claude are powerful. Each conversation starts from zero. No memory. No improvement. No context. Stop using one for a week and it's like you never met.
Hermes compounds.
Day 1: it knows nothing about you. Month 1: it knows how you work and what you're building. Month 6: it knows how you think, which tasks you do every day, and the optimal way to do each one.
Memory. The improvement loop. Trust. Those three things are the bottleneck in AI agents. Models are solved.
Hermes Agent solves all three. Open source. $0 for the agent itself.
The stack is ready. Set it up and use it.
→ Follow — AI agent blueprints every week
→ Save this — the setup prompts are worth bookmarking
→ Comment "HERMES" and I'll send you the full soul.md + cron job template for your use case
Resources
Official:
- Hermes Agent Docs — installation, configuration, full CLI reference
- Skills Hub — community skills, browse and install
- GitHub — source, issues, PRs
My articles on Hermes:
- The Complete Hermes /goal Playbook — 21 Workflows — copy-paste /goal commands for every business function
- Hermes /goal — The Full Guide — autonomous execution, max_turns, best practices
- How to Make Hermes + xurl Actually Work as a System — recurring X content workflow
- Hermes x Bitwarden — The Security Stack AI Agents Actually Need — production credential management + egress firewall
@NousResearch @Teknium
