# What is Hermes Agent? > Hermes Agent is a free, MIT-licensed, self-hosted AI agent from Nous Research that learns from its own work, keeps memory across sessions, and can be reached from the terminal, a desktop app, or your chat apps. Canonical: https://hermeswatcher.com/hermes-agent Hermes Agent is an open-source agent built by Nous Research and published at github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent. You install it on your own machine or server, point it at a model provider, and talk to it through a terminal CLI or TUI, the Hermes Desktop app for macOS and Windows, or a messaging bot. The agent itself costs nothing. Model providers and optional hosted services such as the Nous Portal charge separately. Its main selling point is a built-in learning loop. When Hermes works out a multi-step workflow, recovers from errors, or gets corrected, it can save that approach as a reusable skill and patch the skill later. It also keeps two small curated memory files (agent notes and a user profile), records every session in a searchable SQLite database, and supports external memory providers for deeper user modeling. Skills follow the open agentskills.io format, and every installed skill becomes its own slash command. Hermes is built to run wherever you need it. It runs on Linux, macOS, WSL2, native Windows and Android (Termux), and the README says it can live anywhere from a $5 VPS to a GPU cluster. Its terminal tool can execute commands locally or inside Docker, SSH, Modal, Daytona, Vercel Sandbox or Singularity backends. A single gateway process connects the same agent and memory to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email and many more platforms. That gateway also runs scheduled jobs and sends their results to whichever chat you pick. ## What it can do - **Self-improving skills**: The agent writes and patches its own SKILL.md files with the skill_manage tool. You can also install skills from hubs such as the official repo, skills.sh, GitHub taps and well-known endpoints. - **Persistent memory**: MEMORY.md (agent notes) and USER.md (your profile) are loaded into every session. Both are size-limited, so the agent has to keep them concise. An optional write-approval gate lets you review changes first. - **Session search**: Every CLI, TUI and gateway session is stored in ~/.hermes/state.db. The session_search tool can search that history with FTS5 full-text search. - **Messaging gateway**: One gateway process exposes the agent on more than 25 chat platforms. Access is deny-by-default and controlled with allowlists or DM pairing codes. - **Scheduled tasks**: A built-in cron scheduler accepts natural-language or cron-syntax schedules and delivers results to a chat or local files. You can create jobs from the CLI, with /cron, or just by asking. - **Subagent delegation**: The delegate_task tool starts isolated child agents with restricted toolsets for parallel work. The execute_code tool runs Python scripts that call Hermes tools. - **Sandboxed terminal backends**: Commands can run locally or in docker, ssh, modal, daytona, vercel_sandbox or singularity backends. You select one with terminal.backend. - **MCP client and server**: Hermes connects to MCP servers over stdio or HTTP, configured under mcp_servers or added with hermes mcp. With hermes mcp serve it can also act as an MCP server itself. - **Web, browser and media tools**: Toolsets cover web search and extraction, browser automation, vision, image generation and text-to-speech. Voice mode works in the CLI and in messaging apps. - **Profiles**: Profiles are fully isolated Hermes instances, each with its own config, keys, memory, skills, sessions and cron jobs. Each profile also gets its own command alias. - **Editor and API integration**: hermes acp brings Hermes into editors such as VS Code, Zed and JetBrains. An API server mode exposes it as an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for frontends like Open WebUI. - **Checkpoints and rollback**: Opt-in filesystem checkpoints (off by default) snapshot the working directory before file changes, and /rollback restores an earlier state. ## Where it runs Linux (terminal install via install.sh), macOS (terminal install, or the Hermes Desktop app; the installation docs say the desktop app is Apple Silicon only), Windows 10/11, native via PowerShell installer or Hermes Desktop app, Windows via WSL2 (WSL1 is not reliable), Android / Termux (aarch64, APT package), Docker (image nousresearch/hermes-agent) ## Model providers Nous Portal, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, GitHub Copilot ACP, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Ramp Router, Fireworks AI, NovitaAI, AI Gateway, z.ai / GLM, Kimi / Moonshot, Kimi / Moonshot (China), Arcee AI, GMI Cloud, Nebius Token Factory, Actual Computer, MiniMax, MiniMax China, xAI (Grok), xAI Grok OAuth (SuperGrok), Qwen Cloud (Alibaba DashScope), Alibaba Cloud (Coding Plan), Alibaba Cloud (Token Plan), Kilo Code, Xiaomi MiMo, Tencent TokenHub, Tencent TokenPlan, OpenCode Zen, CommandCode, OpenCode Go, DeepSeek, Hugging Face, Google / Gemini, Google Vertex AI, OpenAI API (direct), Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, NVIDIA Build, Ollama Cloud, Qwen OAuth, MiniMax OAuth, StepFun, LM Studio, Local servers: Ollama, vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, Custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint ## Messaging platforms Telegram, Discord, Slack, Google Chat, WhatsApp, WhatsApp Cloud API, Signal, SMS (Twilio), Email, Home Assistant (plugin), Mattermost, Matrix, DingTalk, Feishu/Lark, WeCom, WeCom Callback, Weixin (WeChat), BlueBubbles (iMessage), Photon (iMessage), QQ (QQBot), Yuanbao, Microsoft Teams, LINE, ntfy, Raft, IRC, Buzz, SimpleX Chat ## License and cost Hermes Agent is MIT-licensed open source from Nous Research. The agent itself is free; model providers and optional hosted services charge separately. Note: Reflects the official Hermes Agent docs and GitHub README as read on 2026-10-20. The latest stable release at that time was v0.22.2 (Oct 15, 2026), with nightly canary builds on top. Commands and flags change quickly between releases, so check with hermes --help. ## Sources - [Hermes Agent homepage](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/) - [NousResearch/hermes-agent on GitHub](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent) - [Features overview](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/overview) - [Skills System](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/skills) - [Persistent Memory](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/memory) - [Messaging Gateway](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/messaging/) - [AI Providers](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/integrations/providers) - [Installation](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/getting-started/installation/) - [Configuration](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/configuration) --- HermesWatcher is an independent guide. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nous Research. The [official Hermes Agent documentation](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs) and [repository](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent) from Nous Research are the authority; each page here lists the official sources it was written from. If this site and the official docs disagree, trust the official docs. Index for agents: https://hermeswatcher.com/llms.txt