You've probably used an AI coding assistant by now. Copilot finishes your lines, Cursor rewrites your functions, Claude Code debugs your PRs. They're all variations on the same idea: an AI that lives inside your editor and helps you write code faster.
Hermes Agent is something different. It's not a copilot. It's an open-source autonomous agent built by Nous Research that learns from its own experience, creates reusable skills on the fly, and runs wherever you put it: a cheap VPS, a home server, or serverless infrastructure that costs nearly nothing when idle. You talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM you never SSH into. It's not tied to your laptop.
The project has 217,000 GitHub stars for a reason. Here's what it actually is, how to get it running in about a minute, and the first three things worth trying.
What Hermes Agent actually is
Hermes Agent is an autonomous agent with a built-in learning loop. The loop works like this: every time you and Hermes accomplish something non-trivial, like fixing a tricky bug, configuring a deployment pipeline, or wiring up a new tool. It can save that procedure as a skill. A skill is just a markdown file with instructions. Next time a similar task comes up, Hermes loads the skill and follows the playbook instead of figuring it out from scratch.
Skills get better with use. If a skill's instructions are outdated or missing a step, Hermes patches them on the spot. Over time, you accumulate a library of battle-tested procedures that compound. This is the thing that separates Hermes from a chatbot. It doesn't just answer questions, it gets more capable the longer it runs.
Under the hood, it's an MIT-licensed Python project that talks to any LLM provider you point it at. Over 20 are supported, including OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, and local models. The recommended setup is through Nous Portal, which gives you one OAuth login, one bill, and access to 300+ models plus built-in tools for web search, image generation, text-to-speech, and browser automation. But you can also bring your own API keys if you prefer.
How to install it
The installer handles everything. On macOS, Linux, WSL2, or Android via Termux:
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash
On Windows, in PowerShell:
iex (irm https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.ps1)
The installer pulls in Python, Node.js, ripgrep, ffmpeg, and everything else Hermes needs. It clones the repo, sets up a virtual environment, and wires up the hermes command globally. The whole thing takes under two minutes.
After installing, reload your shell and run the fastest path to a working agent:
hermes setup --portal
This opens a browser for OAuth. One login covers your model access plus all four Tool Gateway tools: web search, image generation, text-to-speech, and a cloud browser. No API keys to juggle. Once that's done, just type hermes and you're chatting.
There's also a native desktop app for macOS, Linux, and Windows. Launch it with hermes desktop. But the CLI is where most people start.
First thing to try: write a skill from experience
Skills are where Hermes actually earns its keep. Here's the fastest way to see it work.
Do something non-trivial with Hermes. Ask it to set up a project, configure a tool, or debug something that takes a few turns. When it succeeds, Hermes will offer to save the approach as a skill. Say yes. That skill now lives in ~/.hermes/skills/ as a markdown file with instructions, pitfalls, and a verification checklist.
Next time you (or anyone else using that Hermes instance) hits the same kind of task, Hermes loads the skill and follows the playbook. The skill gets patched when it's wrong and sharpened when it's vague. After a few weeks of regular use, you stop repeating yourself. Hermes remembers how your projects are structured, which linter you prefer, and how to run your tests.
The Skills Hub has 88,000+ community skills you can install too, covering everything from Apple Notes management to LLM fine-tuning. Every installed skill becomes a slash command, like /gif-search funny cats or /axolotl fine-tune Llama 3. Hermes loads the skill's instructions on demand, so you're not burning tokens on stuff you're not using.
Hermes is designed to be something you talk to from anywhere, not something you SSH into. After hermes setup --portal, configure a messaging gateway:
hermes gateway setup
It walks you through connecting Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, or any of the 20+ supported platforms. Once it's wired up, you message Hermes from your phone while it crunches through a long-running task on a server somewhere. It notifies you when it's done. This is the moment where Hermes stops feeling like a terminal tool and starts feeling like an agent you keep around.
Third thing: spawn subagents for parallel work
Hermes can delegate work to isolated subagents that run in parallel with their own context windows. This is useful when you have independent tasks that don't need to share state. Research a topic while a different subagent lints your code, or check three different APIs at once.
From a conversation, just ask Hermes to "research X and Y in parallel" and it spawns the subagents. They report back when they're done. It's a simple model, but it's the kind of thing that makes multi-step workflows feel fast instead of sequential.
What makes it different from Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code
Those tools are IDE copilots. They help you write code faster inside your editor. Hermes is an autonomous agent that lives wherever you deploy it. The table version:
| Copilot / Cursor / Claude Code | Hermes Agent |
|---|
| Where it lives | Your editor | Anywhere (VPS, server, Modal, Daytona) |
| What it does | Helps you write code | Does work autonomously, learns from it |
| How you talk to it | IDE chat panel | CLI, Telegram, Discord, Slack, 20+ platforms |
| Memory | Per-session context | Persistent, self-improving across sessions |
| Skills | None | Creates, patches, and reuses procedures |
| Scheduling | None | Built-in cron with any-platform delivery |
| License | Proprietary | MIT |
If you want faster autocomplete, use Copilot. If you want an agent that learns your stack, runs on your infrastructure, and gets more useful the longer it's around, Hermes is the thing to try.
I've written before about making sites readable by AI agents and making them usable by agents with WebMCP. Hermes is the other side of that equation. It's the agent that can actually consume and act on that content. Install it, teach it one thing, and watch it get better.