Personal assistant
Hermes Agent
Open-source self-hosted AI agent with a terminal UI and a messaging gateway, runnable against any model provider.
Compare only what the shape makes comparable.
Designed to run on the user's own machine or server. README: '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.' Seven terminal backends are documented: local, Docker, SSH, Singularity, Modal, Daytona, Vercel Sandbox. Installers cover Linux, macOS, WSL2, Termux and native Windows.
Named: Nous Portal (300+ models), OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Google Vertex, AWS Bedrock, Azure Foundry, Ollama (local), xAI Grok, MiniMax, custom/self-hosted endpoints
- Hermes Agent (software)$0 none
- Nous Portal—Freecontact
- Nous Portal—Pluscontact
- Nous Portal—Supercontact
- Nous Portal—Ultracontact
- MCP support
- Plugins / custom tools
- Subagents / parallel agents
- Hooks / lifecycle events
- Persistent memory
- Background execution
- Sandboxing / permissions
- Git / PR integration
Memory is loaded from disk into the system prompt as a frozen block at session start; edits made during a session persist to disk but do not appear in the prompt until the next session. src↗
Subagents start with a completely fresh conversation and have zero knowledge of the parent's history—the parent must pass everything in the goal and context fields. src↗
Multiple agents may not share one Hermes home directory; memory is scoped per profile to avoid conflicting edits. src↗
Nous's own Hermes 4 models are available through the Portal but the docs state they are not recommended for use inside Hermes Agent, being tuned for chat and reasoning rather than the rapid tool-calling loop. src↗
On Termux/Android the installer uses a curated extra because the full extra pulls Android-incompatible voice dependencies. src↗
- pricing.tiers[].usd_per_month
portal.nousresearch.com returned HTTP 429 on every attempt this session (/, /manage-subscription, /info), so no first-party page with USD figures could be opened. Tier names come from the Hermes Agent homepage HTML ('Free • Plus • Super • Ultra').
- category
Recorded as personal-assistant rather than harness-library because Nous's own docs present it as a self-hosted agent you talk to (terminal TUI plus Telegram/Discord/Slack/WhatsApp/Signal/Email gateway), not primarily as a library to build on. It is model-agnostic and does expose a Python library and API server, so harness-library is a defensible alternative reading.
- github_stars
Sourced from the GitHub API on 2026-08-20; the figure is a point-in-time count, not a first-party editorial claim.
- interfaces
All four values were read first-party: 'terminal' and 'chat-platform' from the README (TUI plus Telegram/Discord/Slack/WhatsApp/Signal/Email gateway), 'web' from website/docs/user-guide/features/web-dashboard.md (browser-based admin panel), 'api' from website/docs/user-guide/features/api-server.md (OpenAI-compatible HTTP endpoint). A Hermes Desktop app for macOS/Windows/Linux also exists but has no matching value in the enum.
What people say about Hermes Agent
110 opinions · 2026-05-03 to 2026-08-20 · medium confidence
Hand-classified 110 opinions across four platforms; score = (pos; neg) / total * 100. Medium confidence: sample is now four times larger and HN and Reddit converge, but 56% of it comes from the project's own subreddit, which structurally over-samples committed users.
Second pass added 62 Reddit opinions (five r/hermesagent threads plus Hermes-specific comments inside an r/LocalLLaMA thread), 6 more third-party GitHub bodies, and the EvoMap blog post at the center of the attribution dispute. Mix is now Reddit 62 / HN 38 / GitHub 9 / blog 1; YouTube and X are 0. The biggest caveat is that r/hermesagent is the project's own enthusiast sub—an HN commenter already in this sample says exactly that ('the responses are bound to be biased'), and its baseline is people who already chose the tool and are tuning it. Even so it only scores +6, because the Parallel default-routing thread inside that same sub is savage and includes the maintainer arguing with users from the official account. GitHub scores -78, which is defect-tracker structure rather than sentiment. Reddit and HN agree closely (+6 vs +13), so the two-platform read is stable.
- hackernews+13
- reddit+6
- github-78
GitHub reads 91 points lower than the highest platform here. Issue trackers collect defects only, so that number measures activity more than opinion. Why we publish it anyway.
Sentiment split along a line that hardened over 2026. Homelab and local-model users stayed steadily positive from March onward and are the most credible voices in the sample, because they describe specific working setups. The reputational damage is separate and started in May with the EvoMap attribution dispute, compounded in June by the default-search-routing discovery and the pre-installed Polymarket skill, and by August had settled into a stock dismissal ('AI slop developed by AI agents'). Notably, several people who moved off OpenClaw moved to Hermes—so it is winning switchers while losing the argument about its own governance. SECOND-PASS PLATFORM DIVERGENCE: HN and Reddit agree here (+13 and +6), which is the opposite of the OpenClaw result and raises confidence that Hermes genuinely sits near neutral. The interesting split is inside Reddit rather than between platforms: the same subreddit that produces month-by-month appreciation posts also produced the June Parallel thread, where the official Nous account argued with its own users and got downvoted into negative territory on several replies. Practitioners like the tool; almost nobody defends the project's governance.
Praised for
- Best fit for homelab and self-hosted sysadmin work8×
- Runs well on local and cheap open-weight models7×
- Chat-transport flexibility5×
- Preferred over OpenClaw by some switchers4×
Complained about
- Maintainer conduct toward users9×
- Attribution dispute handled badly8×
- Perceived as agent-written slop6×
- Value unclear without a frontier model6×
- Dangerous defaults and weak guardrails5×
- Confusing site and unexplained product4×
I use Hermes at home. Swapped out Openclaw for this. It seems to work better with smaller contexts, chuncking it up in smaller pieces. ... It's magical. Each morning I get a small update whether the backup ran, if pods are stuck or behaving weirdly etc...
Its been a great driver for Hermes Agent, serving local MoE and dense models up to 122B. It now handles about 90% of my inference load ... Zero issues so far. Extremely reliable and gives me straight path to production for VPS deployment.
I've added MCP servers to my internal business tools (Elixir apps) and can chat with the Nous Hermes agent over Telegram about pending orders, inventory level, historical product prices, etc., without having to click/dick around with a web UI.
Hermes Agent is AI slop "ai assistant" software that is being entirely developed by a bunch of AI agents. They are stuck in a constant whack-a-mole bug fix session because the agents keep breaking things.
The entire Hermes Agent project is unresponsive, unintuitive, unsafe, vibe-coded — do not entrust it with any confidential information, I advise against buying a subscription or hosting it locally. It is a really poor project.
...teknium1 replaced the entire issue text with a dot, and NousResearch deleted a bunch of subsequent comments. Whether the claims have merit or not, attempting to make the claim go away in this way is at best unprofessional and childish.
The handling of that issue looks _incredibly_ shady. Not touching this project with a ten foot pole..
I've been playing around with Hermes agent the last few weeks, and I found it very difficult to find useful things that you can do by itself.
When I went to the Hermes agent web page, I was left with zero clue about what it did or what it could do.
I hit this on a real machine. The copy reached 461 GB ... and was still growing at roughly 6 GB per minute when I killed it. Free space had gone from ~480 GB to 39 GB. Nothing warns you...
The dangerous-command approval gate applies only to foreground
terminal()calls. The same command dispatched viaterminal(background=true, notify_on_complete=true)executes immediately with no consent check...
I soon found that it hallucinates during a lot of tasks, and the output quality isn't something to write home about. On the other hand, using an expensive or frontier-level model means I'll burn through cash fast.
I have Hermes and set it up so that it works on a self-hosted Matrix instance. It was pretty simple to set up ... I've been replacing more and more apps on my phone with this setup, and it's pretty streamlined. It's nice knowing that everything is local.
Hermes agent assistant for homelab server maintenance backed by the (still cheap) DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731: - Stack enhacements - Updates/upgrades - Security audit - Prometheus/Grafana monitoring and alerting - Backups Basically a sysadmin for my own local cloud.
I use Hermes with both unsloth-gemma4 12b qat and qwen 3.6 28b a3b ( the pruned version). ... I m not saying Hermes is bad ( i m a supporter and i pr on their github ) but it is just a tool . Without proper model, even the best memory management / provider is useless.
2 months in and going fine, ive got an excellent research tool, it does core research, populates Obsdiant, does candidate reviews of articles and scores each one with a summary. ... Its been very very useful.
The main thing I learned from this thread though is that NousResearch governance is handled by children.
there is no fucking way that many PRs are getting honest human reviews. ... for you to come on here and give this lazy boilerplate response isnt a solution to a now an issue of TRUST - a problem neither human nor AI can fix.
DeepSeek + Hermes feels like Claude code terminal for like 25 cents per day.
References to Evolver across all 7 Hermes public materials: 0
This is very helpful for someone like me, that is new looking at the mess of a config Hermes has and going WTF where do I even start.