witcheer's Wingtips #21: credential pools

Republished in his own words, with credit.

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#21 · credential pools

· Models, providers & cost · CLI / Desktop / Gateway

Hermes Wingtips #21: credential pools

a credential pool is several keys or logins for one provider. Hermes picks a healthy key, and when that key is rate-limited or out of quota it rotates to the next one.

(this is different from fallback providers. a fallback jumps to a different provider, and only after every key in the pool is exhausted).

(1) add a second key (OpenRouter example):

hermes auth add openrouter --api-key sk-or-...-key

(2) check the pool: hermes auth list

when Hermes does rotate, the new key has no cached prefix for your chat, so the next request re-reads the full history.

lastly, if you are on Nous Portal with a single OAuth login, you usually do not need a pool. this tip is for multi-key API setups.

All tips are written by witcheer and collected here with credit. Card images stay on his X posts.

witcheer says each tip ran on a real Hermes box before it shipped. Hermes changes fast, so check your version and the linked doc.