Hermes Agent: official Nous Research repo for Hermes Agent

Open-source self-improving AI agent from Nous Research with a terminal UI and a messaging gateway

What Hermes Agent does

Hermes Agent is an AI agent from Nous Research built around a closed learning loop. It creates skills after complex tasks, improves them while they are used, nudges itself to save knowledge, and searches its own past conversations with FTS5 session search and LLM summarization. Honcho dialectic user modeling builds a picture of the user across sessions, and skills follow the agentskills.io open standard.

You reach it through a full terminal UI or through one gateway process that serves Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal and the CLI. A built-in cron scheduler delivers reports to any platform, subagents handle parallel workstreams, and seven terminal backends (local, Docker, SSH, Singularity, Modal, Daytona and Vercel Sandbox) let it run on anything from a $5 VPS to a GPU cluster. Models are swappable with hermes model, including Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI or your own endpoint.

Key features

Full terminal UI with multiline editing, slash-command autocomplete and streaming tool output
One messaging gateway for Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal and CLI, with voice memo transcription
Learning loop with agent-curated memory, autonomous skill creation and skills that improve during use
Built-in cron scheduler that delivers to any platform and takes natural-language schedules
Seven terminal backends, including Docker, SSH, Modal and Daytona
Model switching with hermes model and no code changes

When to use it

Run a personal agent on a cheap VPS and talk to it from Telegram
Schedule daily reports, nightly backups or weekly audits in plain language
Split a large task across isolated parallel subagents
Generate batch trajectories for training tool-calling models

Who it is for: Developers and power users who want a self-hosted agent that remembers past work, runs scheduled jobs and is reachable from chat apps.

How it fits with Hermes Agent

This is the Hermes Agent project itself, the main repository from Nous Research that the community plugins, skills and tools in this directory are built around.

How to install Hermes Agent

These commands are copied from the project's README. Check the repository for the latest steps before you run them.

curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash
source ~/.bashrc
hermes

Requirements: Linux, macOS, WSL2, native Windows (PowerShell) or Android via Termux, plus access to a model provider such as Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI or a custom endpoint

FAQ

What is Hermes Agent?

Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent from Nous Research that learns from use. It creates and refines skills, keeps persistent memory, and can be reached through a terminal UI or chat apps such as Telegram and Discord.

How do I install Hermes Agent?

On Linux, macOS or WSL2, run the curl install script from the README, reload your shell and start it with hermes. On native Windows, run iex (irm https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.ps1) in PowerShell.

Is Hermes Agent free and open source?

Yes. The repository is licensed under MIT. You choose your own model provider, such as Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI or a custom endpoint.