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.
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. Write Python scripts that call tools via RPC, collapsing multi-step pipelines into zero-context-cost turns.
Runs anywhere, not just your laptop
Six terminal backends — local, Docker, SSH, Daytona, Singularity, and Modal. 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, Atropos RL environments, trajectory compression for training the next generation of tool-calling models.
Works on Linux, macOS, WSL2, and Android via Termux. The installer handles the platform-specific setup for you.
Android / Termux: The tested manual path is documented in the Termux guide. On Termux, Hermes installs a curated .[termux] extra because the full .[all] extra currently pulls Android-incompatible voice dependencies.
Windows: Native Windows is not supported. Please install WSL2 and run the command above.
1hermes # Interactive CLI — start a conversation2hermes model # Choose your LLM provider and model3hermes tools # Configure which tools are enabled4hermes config set# Set individual config values5hermes gateway # Start the messaging gateway (Telegram, Discord, etc.)6hermes setup # Run the full setup wizard (configures everything at once)7hermes claw migrate # Migrate from OpenClaw (if coming from OpenClaw)8hermes update # Update to the latest version9hermes doctor # Diagnose any issues
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.
Quick start for contributors — clone and go with setup-hermes.sh:
bash
1git clone https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent.git
2cd hermes-agent
3./setup-hermes.sh # installs uv, creates venv, installs .[all], symlinks ~/.local/bin/hermes4./hermes # auto-detects the venv, no need to `source` first
RL Training (optional): The RL/Atropos integration (environments/) ships via the atroposlib and tinker dependencies pulled in by .[all,dev] — no submodule setup required.
