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Ai-tools

Getting Started With Hermes Agent — Your Personal AI Assistant

Published 2026-07-19 ~406 words Tags: hermes-agent, nous, ai-assistant, setup

Hermes Agent is an open-source AI assistant built by Nous Research. It connects to your chat apps, runs tools on your machine, and can be extended with skills and cron jobs.

What Makes Hermes Different

Most AI assistants live in the cloud and can't touch your local environment. Hermes runs on your machine with full access to your terminal, filesystem, and network. It can:

  • Run shell commands and scripts
  • Read and write files
  • Search the web
  • Deploy code via SSH/SCP
  • Schedule recurring tasks
  • Remember facts across sessions

All from Telegram, Discord, or any connected platform.

Installation

# Via npm (recommended)
npm i -g hermes-agent
# Or one-liner
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash

First Run

hermes init
hermes start

The init command creates ~/.hermes/ with a default config. The start command launches the agent and connects to configured platforms.

Connecting a Chat Platform

Edit ~/.hermes/config.yaml and add your platform credentials:

platforms:
  telegram:
    bot_token: "YOUR_BOT_TOKEN"
    enabled: true
  discord:
    bot_token: "YOUR_DISCORD_TOKEN"
    guild_id: "GUILD_ID"
    enabled: true

Restart the agent: hermes stop && hermes start

Skills — Reusable Procedures

Skills are markdown files that teach Hermes how to handle specific tasks. They live in ~/.hermes/skills/ and can be loaded on demand.

hermes skill create review-code
hermes skill view review-code
hermes skill edit review-code

A skill file looks like:

## Code Review
When asked to review code:

  1. Read the file with read_file
  2. Check for security issues, bugs, style problems
  3. Summarize findings in a structured report

Cron Jobs — Scheduled Tasks

Schedule recurring tasks without manual intervention:

hermes cron create \
  --schedule "0 8   *" \
  --prompt "Check server disk space and report if above 80%"

Delivery can go to the origin chat, all channels, or save locally.

Profiles

Different configurations for different contexts:

hermes profile create work
hermes profile create personal
hermes profile switch work

Each profile has its own skills, plugins, cron jobs, and memory store. Switch between them when context changes.

Memory

Hermes remembers persistent facts across sessions:

hermes memory add "Server is Ubuntu 22.04 with dual RTX 3080 Ti"

Memory is injected into every interaction, so you never have to repeat yourself.

Resources

| Resource | URL | |----------|-----| | Docs | https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs | | Nous Research | https://nousresearch.com | | GitHub | https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent |

Start with hermes init, connect a chat platform, and you've got your own AI assistant running on your hardware.