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Guide

Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent by Nous Research, built around one idea: an agent that grows with you. It learns from experience — saving what works as reusable skills — and keeps persistent memory of who you are and how you work.

7 min read
Open source · MITSelf-improvingBy Nous Research

What Hermes Agent is

Released in February 2026, Hermes runs in your terminal, a native desktop app, your messaging platforms and IDEs. It's provider-agnostic — it works with 20+ model providers, including local models — and it sandboxes the actions it takes so it can work safely.

Its defining feature is the learning loop: when Hermes solves a problem well, it can save the approach as a skill and reuse it next time. Over weeks it builds up a library of how your business runs — which is a genuinely different experience from a stateless chatbot.

What it does well

🔄

Learning loop

Creates skills from experience and improves them during use — the more you use it, the more capable it becomes.

🧠

Persistent memory

Remembers preferences, projects and past solutions, with pluggable memory backends.

🌐

Multi-platform gateway

One agent, one memory, across Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Email and more.

🖥️

Many surfaces

CLI, terminal UI, native desktop app, web dashboard and IDE integration.

🔀

Provider-agnostic

Swap models and providers mid-workflow; rotate credentials across multiple keys.

🛡️

Isolated sandboxing

Five backends — local, Docker, SSH, Singularity, Modal — with container hardening.

How you get it

Install via a shell installer, then run the setup wizard to pick your model and provider:

Terminal
# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.ps1 | iex

# Interactive chat / setup wizard
hermes
hermes setup

Hermes also ships a native desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux if you prefer a graphical interface over the terminal. As with OpenClaw, the practical path for many businesses is a managed setup — configured, sandboxed and connected for you, then simply used from your phone or desktop.

Security & control

Hermes is built with control in mind: sandboxed execution backends, secret redaction, approval modes, and profiles that keep different contexts (work, personal) isolated. Native local-model support means you can run the reasoning on your own hardware if your data-protection requirements demand it.

Why local models matter here. A self-hosted agent usually still calls a hosted model (Claude, GPT…) over an API. Hermes lets you swap that for an open-weight model running on your own hardware — a valuable option when client data must never leave your premises.
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