The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. It's the only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions. Run it on a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure that costs nearly nothing when idle. It's not tied to your laptop — talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM.
Use any model you want — Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, your own endpoint, and many others. Switch with — no code changes, no lock-in.
hermes model
A real terminal interface
Full TUI with multiline editing, slash-command autocomplete, conversation history, interrupt-and-redirect, and streaming tool output.
Lives where you do
Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and CLI — all from a single gateway process. Voice memo transcription, cross-platform conversation continuity.
A closed learning loop
Agent-curated memory with periodic nudges. Autonomous skill creation after complex tasks. Skills self-improve during use. FTS5 session search with LLM summarization for cross-session recall. Honcho dialectic user modeling. Compatible with the agentskills.io open standard.
Scheduled automations
Built-in cron scheduler with delivery to any platform. Daily reports, nightly backups, weekly audits — all in natural language, running unattended.
Delegates and parallelizes
Spawn isolated subagents for parallel workstreams. In Desktop, choose their provider, model, and limits under Settings → Model → Subagents, then Apply the complete route. Write Python scripts that call tools via RPC, collapsing multi-step pipelines into zero-context-cost turns.
Runs anywhere, not just your laptop
Seven terminal backends — local, Docker, SSH, Singularity, Modal, Daytona, and Vercel Sandbox. Daytona and Modal offer serverless persistence — your agent's environment hibernates when idle and wakes on demand, costing nearly nothing between sessions. Run it on a $5 VPS or a GPU cluster.
Research-ready
Batch trajectory generation, trajectory compression for training the next generation of tool-calling models.
Heads up: Native Windows runs Hermes without WSL — CLI, gateway, TUI, and tools all work natively. If you'd rather use WSL2, the Linux/macOS one-liner above works there too. Found a bug? Please file issues.
The source installer delegates Python 3.14, Node.js, npm, ripgrep, FFmpeg,
and Python dependencies to PM. If Git is absent, it stages the verified Git
for Windows archive in Hermes' tool store. It does not replace your system Git.
See installation methods
for the separate MSIX/App Installer package and its update ownership.
Android / Termux: A signed APT repository is available for aarch64 devices, with a stable channel (tagged releases) and a prerelease canary channel. The package includes Python, Node.js, and the TUI. Use the Termux guide, not the desktop/server installer script.
Windows: Native Windows is fully supported — the PowerShell one-liner above installs everything. If you'd rather use WSL2, the Linux command works there too. Native Windows install lives under %LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes; WSL2 installs under ~/.hermes as on Linux.
Windows Defender or antivirus flags uv.exe as malware
If your antivirus (Bitdefender, Windows Defender, etc.) quarantines uv.exe from the Hermes bin folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes\bin\uv.exe), this is a false positive. The file is Astral's uv — the Rust Python package manager Hermes bundles to manage its Python environment. ML-based antivirus engines commonly flag unsigned Rust binaries that download and install packages.
hermes # Interactive CLI — start a conversation
hermes model # Choose your LLM provider and model
hermes tools # Configure which tools are enabled
hermes config set # Set individual config values
hermes config get # Print individual config values
hermes gateway # Start the messaging gateway (Telegram, Discord, etc.)
hermes setup # Run the full setup wizard (configures everything at once)
hermes claw migrate # Migrate from OpenClaw (if coming from OpenClaw)
hermes update # Update to the latest version
hermes doctor # Diagnose any issues
Hermes works with whatever provider you want — that's not changing. But if you'd rather not collect five separate API keys for the model, web search, image generation, TTS, and a cloud browser, Nous Portal covers all of them under one subscription:
300+ models — pick any of them with /model
Tool Gateway — web search, image generation (FAL), text-to-speech (OpenAI), cloud browser (Browser Use), all routed through your sub. No extra accounts.
One command from a fresh install:
hermes setup --portal
That logs you in via OAuth, sets Nous as your provider, and turns on the Tool Gateway. Check what's wired up any time with hermes portal info. Full details on the Tool Gateway docs page.
You can still bring your own keys per-tool whenever you want — the gateway is per-backend, not all-or-nothing.
CLI vs Messaging Quick Reference
Hermes has two entry points: start the terminal UI with hermes, or run the gateway and talk to it from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, or Email. Once you're in a conversation, many slash commands are shared across both interfaces.
Action
CLI
Messaging platforms
Start chatting
hermes
Run hermes gateway setup + hermes gateway start, then send the bot a message
See hermes claw migrate --help for all options, or use the openclaw-migration skill for an interactive agent-guided migration with dry-run previews.
Contributing
We welcome contributions! See the Contributing Guide for development setup, code style, and PR process.
Start with the PM developer workflow
for activation, daily use, dependency changes, and leaving the environment.
Development Setup covers the separate test environment and verification commands.
🔌 computer-use-linux — Linux desktop-control MCP server for Hermes and other MCP hosts, with AT-SPI accessibility trees, Wayland/X11 input, screenshots, and compositor window targeting.
🔌 HermesClaw — Community WeChat bridge: Run Hermes Agent and OpenClaw on the same WeChat account.
