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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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| # Hermes Agent |
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| The self-improving AI agent built by [Nous Research](https://nousresearch.com). 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. |
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| <div style={{display: 'flex', gap: '1rem', marginBottom: '2rem', flexWrap: 'wrap'}}> |
| <a href="/docs/getting-started/installation" style={{display: 'inline-block', padding: '0.6rem 1.2rem', backgroundColor: '#FFD700', color: '#07070d', borderRadius: '8px', fontWeight: 600, textDecoration: 'none'}}>Get Started →</a> |
| <a href="https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent" style={{display: 'inline-block', padding: '0.6rem 1.2rem', border: '1px solid rgba(255,215,0,0.2)', borderRadius: '8px', textDecoration: 'none'}}>View on GitHub</a> |
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| ## What is Hermes Agent? |
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| 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. |
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| ## Quick Links |
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| | 🚀 **[Installation](/docs/getting-started/installation)** | Install in 60 seconds on Linux, macOS, or WSL2 | |
| | 📖 **[Quickstart Tutorial](/docs/getting-started/quickstart)** | Your first conversation and key features to try | |
| | 🗺️ **[Learning Path](/docs/getting-started/learning-path)** | Find the right docs for your experience level | |
| | ⚙️ **[Configuration](/docs/user-guide/configuration)** | Config file, providers, models, and options | |
| | 💬 **[Messaging Gateway](/docs/user-guide/messaging)** | Set up Telegram, Discord, Slack, or WhatsApp | |
| | 🔧 **[Tools & Toolsets](/docs/user-guide/features/tools)** | 47 built-in tools and how to configure them | |
| | 🧠 **[Memory System](/docs/user-guide/features/memory)** | Persistent memory that grows across sessions | |
| | 📚 **[Skills System](/docs/user-guide/features/skills)** | Procedural memory the agent creates and reuses | |
| | 🔌 **[MCP Integration](/docs/user-guide/features/mcp)** | Connect to MCP servers, filter their tools, and extend Hermes safely | |
| | 🧭 **[Use MCP with Hermes](/docs/guides/use-mcp-with-hermes)** | Practical MCP setup patterns, examples, and tutorials | |
| | 🎙️ **[Voice Mode](/docs/user-guide/features/voice-mode)** | Real-time voice interaction in CLI, Telegram, Discord, and Discord VC | |
| | 🗣️ **[Use Voice Mode with Hermes](/docs/guides/use-voice-mode-with-hermes)** | Hands-on setup and usage patterns for Hermes voice workflows | |
| | 🎭 **[Personality & SOUL.md](/docs/user-guide/features/personality)** | Define Hermes' default voice with a global SOUL.md | |
| | 📄 **[Context Files](/docs/user-guide/features/context-files)** | Project context files that shape every conversation | |
| | 🔒 **[Security](/docs/user-guide/security)** | Command approval, authorization, container isolation | |
| | 💡 **[Tips & Best Practices](/docs/guides/tips)** | Quick wins to get the most out of Hermes | |
| | 🏗️ **[Architecture](/docs/developer-guide/architecture)** | How it works under the hood | |
| | ❓ **[FAQ & Troubleshooting](/docs/reference/faq)** | Common questions and solutions | |
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| ## Key Features |
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| - **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](https://github.com/plastic-labs/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](https://nousresearch.com), the lab behind Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche. Works with [Nous Portal](https://portal.nousresearch.com), [OpenRouter](https://openrouter.ai), 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_code` collapses multi-step pipelines into single inference calls |
| - **Open standard skills** — Compatible with [agentskills.io](https://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](https://nousresearch.com) — the lab behind Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche models |
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