🔥 NousResearch/hermes-agent

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 (200+ models), z.ai/GLM, Kimi/Moonshot, MiniMax, OpenAI, or your own endpoint. Switch with hermes model — no code changes, no lock-in.

A real terminal interfaceFull TUI with multiline editing, slash-command autocomplete, conversation history, interrupt-and-redirect, and streaming tool output. Lives where you doTelegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and CLI — all from a single gateway process. Voice memo transcription, cross-platform conversation continuity. A closed learning loopAgent-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 automationsBuilt-in cron scheduler with delivery to any platform. Daily reports, nightly backups, weekly audits — all in natural language, running unattended. Delegates and parallelizesSpawn 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 laptopSix 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-readyBatch trajectory generation, Atropos RL environments, trajectory compression for training the next generation of tool-calling models.

Quick Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Works on Linux, macOS, and WSL2. The installer handles everything — Python, Node.js, dependencies, and the hermes command. No prerequisites except git.

Windows: Native Windows is not supported. Please install WSL2 and run the command above.

After installation:

source ~/.bashrc # reload shell (or: source ~/.zshrc) hermes # start chatting!

source ~/.bashrc # reload shell (or: source ~/.zshrc) hermes # start chatting!

Getting Started

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 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 # 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 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

📖 Full documentation →

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

Start fresh conversation /new or /reset /new or /reset

Change model /model [provider:model] /model [provider:model]

Set a personality /personality [name] /personality [name]

Retry or undo the last turn /retry, /undo /retry, /undo

Compress context / check usage /compress, /usage, /insights [--days N] /compress, /usage, /insights [days]

Browse skills /skills or / /skills or /

Interrupt current work Ctrl+C or send a new message /stop or send a new message

Platform-specific status /platforms /status, /sethome

For the full command lists, see the CLI guide and the Messaging Gateway guide.

Documentation

All documentation lives at hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs:

Section What's Covered

Quickstart Install → setup → first conversation in 2 minutes

CLI Usage Commands, keybindings, personalities, sessions

Configuration Config file, providers, models, all options

Messaging Gateway Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Home Assistant

Security Command approval, DM pairing, container isolation

Tools & Toolsets 40+ tools, toolset system, terminal backends

Skills System Procedural memory, Skills Hub, creating skills

Memory Persistent memory, user profiles, best practices

MCP Integration Connect any MCP server for extended capabilities

Cron Scheduling Scheduled tasks with platform delivery

Context Files Project context that shapes every conversation

Architecture Project structure, agent loop, key classes

Contributing Development setup, PR process, code style

CLI Reference All commands and flags

Environment Variables Complete env var reference

Migrating from OpenClaw

If you're coming from OpenClaw, Hermes can automatically import your settings, memories, skills, and API keys.

During first-time setup: The setup wizard (hermes setup) automatically detects ~/.openclaw and offers to migrate before configuration begins.

Anytime after install:

hermes claw migrate # Interactive migration (full preset) hermes claw migrate --dry-run # Preview what would be migrated hermes claw migrate --preset user-data # Migrate without secrets hermes claw migrate --overwrite # Overwrite existing conflicts

hermes claw migrate # Interactive migration (full preset) hermes claw migrate --dry-run # Preview what would be migrated hermes claw migrate --preset user-data # Migrate without secrets hermes claw migrate --overwrite # Overwrite existing conflicts

What gets imported:

• SOUL.md — persona file

• Memories — MEMORY.md and USER.md entries

• Skills — user-created skills → ~/.hermes/skills/openclaw-imports/

• Command allowlist — approval patterns

• Messaging settings — platform configs, allowed users, working directory

• API keys — allowlisted secrets (Telegram, OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, ElevenLabs)

• TTS assets — workspace audio files

• Workspace instructions — AGENTS.md (with --workspace-target)

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:

git clone https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent.git cd hermes-agent curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh uv venv venv --python 3.11 source venv/bin/activate uv pip install -e ".[all,dev]" python -m pytest tests/ -q

git clone https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent.git cd hermes-agent curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh uv venv venv --python 3.11 source venv/bin/activate uv pip install -e ".[all,dev]" python -m pytest tests/ -q

RL Training (optional): To work on the RL/Tinker-Atropos integration:

git submodule update --init tinker-atropos uv pip install -e "./tinker-atropos"

Community

• 💬 Discord

• 📚 Skills Hub

• 🐛 Issues

• 💡 Discussions

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Built by Nous Research.