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title: Hermes Agent Documentation
description: >-
The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. A built-in learning loop
that creates skills from experience, improves them during use, and remembers
across sessions.
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displayed_sidebar: docs
Hermes Agent
The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. The only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions.
What is Hermes Agent?
It's not a coding copilot tethered to an IDE or a chatbot wrapper around a single API. It's an autonomous agent that gets more capable the longer it runs. It lives wherever you put it — a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure (Daytona, Modal) that costs nearly nothing when idle. Talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM you never SSH into yourself. It's not tied to your laptop.
Quick Links
| 🚀 Installation | Install in 60 seconds on Linux, macOS, or WSL2 |
| 📖 Quickstart Tutorial | Your first conversation and key features to try |
| 🗺️ Learning Path | Find the right docs for your experience level |
| ⚙️ Configuration | Config file, providers, models, and options |
| 💬 Messaging Gateway | Set up Telegram, Discord, Slack, or WhatsApp |
| 🔧 Tools & Toolsets | 47 built-in tools and how to configure them |
| 🧠 Memory System | Persistent memory that grows across sessions |
| 📚 Skills System | Procedural memory the agent creates and reuses |
| 🔌 MCP Integration | Connect to MCP servers, filter their tools, and extend Hermes safely |
| 🧭 Use MCP with Hermes | Practical MCP setup patterns, examples, and tutorials |
| 🎙️ Voice Mode | Real-time voice interaction in CLI, Telegram, Discord, and Discord VC |
| 🗣️ Use Voice Mode with Hermes | Hands-on setup and usage patterns for Hermes voice workflows |
| 🎭 Personality & SOUL.md | Define Hermes' default voice with a global SOUL.md |
| 📄 Context Files | Project context files that shape every conversation |
| 🔒 Security | Command approval, authorization, container isolation |
| 💡 Tips & Best Practices | Quick wins to get the most out of Hermes |
| 🏗️ Architecture | How it works under the hood |
| ❓ FAQ & Troubleshooting | Common questions and solutions |
Key Features
- A closed learning loop — Agent-curated memory with periodic nudges, autonomous skill creation, skill self-improvement during use, FTS5 cross-session recall with LLM summarization, and Honcho dialectic user modeling
- Runs anywhere, not just your laptop — 6 terminal backends: local, Docker, SSH, Daytona, Singularity, Modal. Daytona and Modal offer serverless persistence — your environment hibernates when idle, costing nearly nothing
- Lives where you do — CLI, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix, Mattermost, Email, SMS, DingTalk, Feishu, WeCom, BlueBubbles, Home Assistant — 15+ platforms from one gateway
- Built by model trainers — Created by Nous Research, the lab behind Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche. Works with Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, or any endpoint
- Scheduled automations — Built-in cron with delivery to any platform
- Delegates & parallelizes — Spawn isolated subagents for parallel workstreams. Programmatic Tool Calling via
execute_codecollapses multi-step pipelines into single inference calls - Open standard skills — Compatible with agentskills.io. Skills are portable, shareable, and community-contributed via the Skills Hub
- Full web control — Search, extract, browse, vision, image generation, TTS
- MCP support — Connect to any MCP server for extended tool capabilities
- Research-ready — Batch processing, trajectory export, RL training with Atropos. Built by Nous Research — the lab behind Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche models