Hermes Council

What Hermes Council does

Hermes Council is an MCP server that gives Hermes Agent a review step before it acts. The agent submits a plan, code diff, claim, decision or risky action, and the council returns a structured verdict with fields such as allow, allow_with_conditions, deny, top_risks, required_checks, missing_evidence, verified_sources and next_actions.

Each review runs Advocate, Skeptic, Oracle, Contrarian and Arbiter personas that argue and dissent before a final verdict. The tools cover preflight checks on actions such as deploys, migrations and file operations, review of plans and diffs, fact-checking against supplied URLs or optional web search, and comparison of options against criteria. It can also extract DPO preference pairs and normalized rewards for evaluator and RL workflows. Other options include custom personas, fast, standard and deep modes, optional audit logs, packaged Hermes skills, OpenAI-compatible providers and stdio MCP transport.

Key features

• Preflight verdicts on deploys, migrations, file operations and public messages
• Review of implementation plans and code diffs for bugs, missing tests and security regressions
• Fact-checking that separates verified_sources from model-cited sources
• Five debating personas, with support for custom personas
• DPO preference pairs and normalized rewards for evaluator and RL workflows
• Fast, standard and deep modes with optional audit logs

When to use it

• Getting a second opinion before an agent runs a database migration or deploy
• Reviewing a diff that looks plausible but may break a boundary
• Checking a claim against fetched URLs before acting on it
• Generating preference data from council verdicts for evaluation or training

Who it is for: Developers running Hermes Agent on consequential work who want a structured second opinion before risky actions.

How it fits with Hermes Agent

Built for Hermes Agent as an MCP server added under mcp_servers in ~/.hermes/config.yaml or with hermes mcp add, with packaged skills installed to ~/.hermes/skills/council/.

How to install Hermes Council

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

pip install "hermes-council @ git+https://github.com/Ridwannurudeen/hermes-council.git"
export OPENROUTER_API_KEY=your-key-here
hermes-council install-skills

Requirements: Python with pip, Hermes Agent, and one provider API key such as OPENROUTER_API_KEY.

FAQ