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Hermes Agent

The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. The only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions.

<div style={{ display: "flex", gap: "1rem", marginBottom: "2rem", flexWrap: "wrap", }} > <Link to="/getting-started/installation" style={{ display: "inline-block", padding: "0.6rem 1.2rem", backgroundColor: "#FFD700", color: "#07070d", borderRadius: "8px", fontWeight: 600, textDecoration: "none", }} > Get Started → </Link> <a href="https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/desktop" style={{ display: "inline-block", padding: "0.6rem 1.2rem", border: "1px solid rgba(255,215,0,0.2)", borderRadius: "8px", textDecoration: "none", }} > Download Desktop </a> <a href="https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent" style={{ display: "inline-block", padding: "0.6rem 1.2rem", border: "1px solid rgba(255,215,0,0.2)", borderRadius: "8px", textDecoration: "none", }} > View on GitHub </a> </div>

Install

Windows or macOS

To easily install the command-line and desktop applications, download the Hermes Desktop installer from our website and run it.

Without Hermes Desktop:

For a command-line only install without Hermes Desktop, run:

Linux / macOS / WSL2 / Android (Termux)

bash

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

Windows (native)

Run in powershell:

powershell

iex (irm https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.ps1)

See the full Installation Guide for what the installer does, the per-user vs root layout, and Windows-specific notes.

:::tip Fastest path to a working agent After installing, run hermes setup --portal — one OAuth covers a model plus all four Tool Gateway tools (web search, image generation, TTS, browser). See Nous Portal. :::

What is Hermes Agent?

It's not a coding copilot tethered to an IDE or a chatbot wrapper around a single API. It's an autonomous agent that gets more capable the longer it runs. It lives wherever you put it — a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure (Daytona, Modal) that costs nearly nothing when idle. Talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM you never SSH into yourself. It's not tied to your laptop.

Quick Links


🚀 Installation	Install in 60 seconds on Linux, macOS, WSL2, or native Windows
📖 Quickstart Tutorial	Your first conversation and key features to try
🗺️ Learning Path	Find the right docs for your experience level
⚙️ Configuration	Config file, providers, models, and options
💬 Messaging Gateway	Set up Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Teams, or more
🔧 Tools & Toolsets	60+ built-in tools and how to configure them
🧠 Memory System	Persistent memory that grows across sessions
📚 Skills System	Procedural memory the agent creates and reuses
🔌 MCP Integration	Connect to MCP servers, filter their tools, and extend Hermes safely
🧭 Use MCP with Hermes	Practical MCP setup patterns, examples, and tutorials
🎙️ Voice Mode	Real-time voice interaction in CLI, Telegram, Discord, and Discord VC
🗣️ Use Voice Mode with Hermes	Hands-on setup and usage patterns for Hermes voice workflows
🎭 Personality & SOUL.md	Define Hermes' default voice with a global SOUL.md
📄 Context Files	Project context files that shape every conversation
🔒 Security	Command approval, authorization, container isolation
💡 Tips & Best Practices	Quick wins to get the most out of Hermes
🏗️ Architecture	How it works under the hood
❓ FAQ & Troubleshooting	Common questions and solutions

Key Features

A closed learning loop — Agent-curated memory with periodic nudges, autonomous skill creation, skill self-improvement during use, FTS5 cross-session recall with LLM summarization, and Honcho dialectic user modeling
Runs anywhere, not just your laptop — 6 terminal backends: local, Docker, SSH, Daytona, Singularity, Modal. Daytona and Modal offer serverless persistence — your environment hibernates when idle, costing nearly nothing
Lives where you do — CLI, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix, Mattermost, Email, SMS, DingTalk, Feishu, WeCom, Weixin, QQ Bot, Yuanbao, BlueBubbles, Home Assistant, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and more — 20+ platforms from one gateway
Built by model trainers — Created by Nous Research, the lab behind Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche. Works with Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, or any endpoint
Scheduled automations — Built-in cron with delivery to any platform
Delegates & parallelizes — Spawn isolated subagents for parallel workstreams. Programmatic Tool Calling via execute_code collapses multi-step pipelines into single inference calls
Open standard skills — Compatible with agentskills.io. Skills are portable, shareable, and community-contributed via the Skills Hub
Full web control — Search, extract, browse, vision, image generation, TTS — one subscription via Nous Portal bundles all of them
MCP support — Connect to any MCP server for extended tool capabilities
Research-ready — Batch processing, trajectory export, RL training with Atropos. Built by Nous Research — the lab behind Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche models

For LLMs and coding agents

Machine-readable entry points to this documentation:

/llms.txt — curated index of every doc page with short descriptions. ~17 KB, safe to load into an LLM context.
/llms-full.txt — every doc page concatenated into a single markdown file for one-shot ingestion. ~1.8 MB.

Both files also resolve at /docs/llms.txt and /docs/llms-full.txt. Generated fresh on every deploy.

Hermes Agent Documentation