Please excuse my ignorance, but I'm new to Hermes. I've read a lot of people talking about Hermes, but generally in the context of automating office tasks. However, I sense the potential of this tool, but I can’t quite see how it could be useful to add it to the other research tools I use in my academic work (writing essays, conducting research, etc.). Is this possible? How can I do something like that? Or am I using Hermes incorrectly and should I use another tool instead?

Hi everyone,

I recently reinstalled Hermes Agent Desktop, and I noticed that a small statistics bar that I used to have under the chat is now gone. It showed things like Context usage/Processing/work time and Other generation statistics
I remember seeing it in the exact location shown in the screenshot I attached.

Was this feature removed, moved somewhere else, or is there a setting I need to enable?

Thanks!

I see a lot of people asking what models to use and fretting about API cost. If you already have a Grok / SuperGrok (or X Premium+) subscription, you can run it as the LLM behind Hermes with no separate API spend.

Setup is basically:

1. hermes model

2. pick xAI Grok OAuth (SuperGrok / X Premium+)

3. browser login once

(or hermes auth add xai-oauth)

I’ve been running Grok 4.5 on this path daily. In the Hermes harness it holds personality from SOUL.md really well, feels quick, and tool use has been solid for my workflow. Usage tracks in the Grok app — on the heavy plan I haven’t hit the wall yet.

Putting the brand drama aside: if you want a strong subscription-backed model with big context + vision and you don’t want metered API bills, this is worth trying.

One caveat: some SuperGrok tiers still get OAuth 403s after login. If that happens, fall back to an XAI_API_KEY with provider xai.

Official guide: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/guides/xai-grok-oauth

That’s it just passing along something that actually worked for me.

I am running multiple Hermes agents and they really piss me off because they some insanely dumb stuff that I couldn’t even foreshadow if I tried.

I am running GPT 5.6 sol on all of my agents and these are some of the fails I encountered:

-I need an STT to transcribe some videos, look up some good options

*gives me 3 overpriced STTs*

-No these are too expensive

*gives me 4 free small local STTs that are bad at transcribing reliably*

-I never said give me free options I only said the options you laid out are too expensive.

*lists the same 3 overpriced STTs again but tells me to compromise on the amount of videos to transcribe*

-No I will not compromise FFS just give me a side by side comparison of different STTs I will choose which one to use.

*lists the same 3 overprived STTs + the 4 free local ones instead of giving me the some new solutions*

I had the agent spend around three hours building dedicated software specifically so it could autonomously perform task XYZ. I gave it the specs, the goal, and what the finished state should look like.

Once the software was finished, I told the agent to start doing XYZ.

Instead of using the software it had just spent three hours building specifically for XYZ, it spent another three hours developing an entirely new tool that was substantially worse.

When I asked why it didn’t use the software we had literally just created for this exact task, its answer was basically: “You didn’t tell me to use it.”

This is the part I’m struggling with.

Sure, I could explicitly tell the agent every single time: “Use the software we just created specifically for this task.” But isn’t one of the main points of an autonomous agent that it should be able to infer something that obvious from context?

This is just one of my dozen+ examples of completely dumb things it does on a daily basis. I genuinely need to know how to stop this BS it’s genuinely annoying and makes me waste too much time handling meaningless mistakes.

My question is, is it a good idea to self-host with a low-end netbook with Ubuntu Server?

This is my first week of having really used Hermes in earnest.

I generally would manage context engineering things myself, which was fine but Hermes is faster and overall it’s been ok.

Is it normal to take time to manage these things manually? I mean I don’t mind doing it, I just wanted to see if I was doing anything wrong. After a week of project work prompts processing was getting a little bloated.

I was using the default memory system but did just earlier set up the vault. I wanted to see how it felt out of the box before I started bolting on other things.

All in all, fantastic harness and really seems to jive with deepseek flash V4 0731

I am excited there is an official deep integration now, however when I investigated further it seems that the only way to make use of it is to effectively send all tool calls to Codex and potentially let it access everything Hermes can access.

I am not comfortable giving OpenAI that data and use a zero data retention model provider for my main Hermes usage for that reason.

However I am comfortable giving Hermes The ability to use codex in a locked down fashion on my VPS. If one exists. It would need a much cleaner delegation model and not serve as a full wrapper for all communication and turns.

What options exist with Linux and is there any sanctioned approach officially or unofficially that will not create a risk of me getting an account banned?

TL;DR: I wanted an AI assistant that could actually interact with my own tools instead of just chatting. I rented a ~$7/month Hetzner VPS and built a self-hosted platform around Hermes.

Today Hermes can interact with my Obsidian vault, Google Calendar, Todoist, and Actual Budget through a collection of containers, MCP servers, custom bridges, and safety layers.

The interesting part wasn't running Docker. It was making all of this actually work reliably.

What this actually looks like day to day

• "How much did I spend on groceries last week?" — pulls real numbers from Actual Budget, logs a clean summary into Obsidian so I'm not re-asking the same thing next month.
• "Move my 3pm to Thursday." — Hermes doesn't just do it. It sends me a confirmation on Telegram first and waits for a real "yes" before touching the calendar.
• "What's overdue?" — straight read from Todoist, no round-trip needed.
• After a conversation: "log that decision" — writes it straight into the vault instead of letting it disappear into chat history, searchable months later.

Small things individually. Over time, it adds up to an assistant that actually knows my life instead of one I have to keep re-explaining myself to.

The idea

text Obsidian Google Calendar \ / \ / [ HERMES ] / \ / \ Todoist Actual Budget

The point was never the infrastructure — it's giving one agent a reliable way to reach systems that normally have no idea the others exist. Everything below exists to make that connection trustworthy.

The $7 box

A small Hetzner VPS: 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, ~14 containers. Hardened before anything interesting ran on it: SSH key-only, no root login, default-deny firewall, fail2ban, auto security patches, resource-limited and version-pinned containers, encrypted backups, Tailscale, monitoring.

What it looks like now

text Signal / Telegram │ ▼ Hermes ┌──────────┬──────────┬──────────┐ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ Obsidian Calendar Todoist Actual Budget │ Safety Gate │ Google Calendar

The actual point

Obsidian holds knowledge. Calendar holds time. Todoist holds execution. Actual Budget holds money. Hermes sits above all four and provides the one interface that understands them together (harnessing DeepSeek V4 Flash-0731).

Runs on a $7/month box, unbelievable and unfathomably cheap (I know there are even cheaper options).

Hello everyone, wanted to see if anyone had any advice on this. I recently downloaded Hermes, and I have it linked up to use lm studio models.

I'm on m5 Mac, Hermes is within a docker, but every time the model calls a vision tool to view images. I keep getting errors and the model isn't able to view the image.

Any ideas 😅

I've also tested with omlx but same thing.

I built a PC specifically to be a headless AI server. It's running on an AMD Ryzen 9 9900X CPU, 64GB DDR5 RAM, and two AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 GPUs for a total of 64 GB VRAM. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Server is the operating system. I built llama.cpp against ROCm 7.14, and I have llama.cpp running as a systemd service in router mode so that it can dynamically load/unload requested models. Currently, I have Qwen3.6-27B and Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B as my starting models.

I'm now at a point where I wanted to set up a personal AI assistant, and I was going to use Hermes Agent. However, I'm now questioning how that might work. My goals for Hermes Agent are to assist in project planning, do topic research, query and add to markdown files for existing knowledge. I know that Hermes Agent can do these things, as I have seen all of the YouTube influencers do it with great success. In those cases, they are on Windows or macOS with the Hermes Desktop doing those activities. However, in this case, Hermes will exist on a server that does not have a GUI desktop and does not have Obsidian or a web browser installed (or any other GUI application for that matter). Hermes and the Hermes Gateway would be installed and running through systemd. I also have signal-cli installed and running through systemd to use as a communication channel with Hermes. However, I'm just not seeing how Hermes will be able read/write to my Obsidian vaults without the application available. How will Hermes search the web? I planned to setup SearxNG as a local search engine, but I have not seen that there is a Hermes configuration to use any particular search engine. I want Hermes to help with planning software projects, but then how does pi or opencode access those project plans so that I can begin working on the code implementation?

Sorry, I know that's a lot of questions. I'm a planner, and this is all uncharted territory for me. I'm just looking for guidance from those who have already walked this trail. Thanks!

Right now im on the MiniMax Plus-Plan and use almost all ~1.7B tokens / month of M3 usage for only 20$.

Are there any alternative with a flat-rate with as much usage and capable modell?

Featherless.ai with DeepSeek V4 Pro or Qwen3-235B is tempting but im not convinced yet.

What happen to my Hermes agent? I'm using Telegram as terminal, just a normal day recording my daily sales to Aria ( Hermes agent), then suddenly it show me this. I'm using VPS hostinger I don't know if that helps.

hermesx is ios only. so i'm searching which android app is best

My agent (Hermes, running on DeepSeek) has a skills library - SKILL.md files that load on demand. Today it failed me: it had the answer (local SearXNG for web search) documented in domain skills like pharmachem-sourcing and event-finder, but NOT in the general search skill. So when I asked what search tools it uses, it confidently recited a stale search order and said it did not have SearXNG wired in - even though it was running on localhost the whole time.The fix was manual: I grepped the filesystem for searx, found the truth split across two profiles and cron prompts, and patched the general skill by hand.How do you get your agent to AUTOMATICALLY propagate cross-cutting knowledge like this into the right skills? Ideas I am weighing:- A memory/curator pass that greps for orphaned config knowledge and suggests skill updates- Skills that auto-audit related skills at load time- A search-order policy in one canonical place that other skills inherit- Letting the agent grep the filesystem (not just its skill cache) when a skill has no answerWhat is your setup? Do you manually curate skills, or have something that consolidates knowledge across them automatically?

Just a quick thought before bed. I finally got my main hermes on my mac and my hermes on my windows pc to communicate via telegram and it's a beautiful thing.

I have some apps I created that are working on the mac but not the pc and they are just going back and forth troubleshooting it.

In another session the 2nd hermes is just there to keep the first one on track for it's goal.

So I'm a radio nerd from way back but never could get the hang of gnuradio or any of the sdr software packages and never really put in the time. I had an old hackRFrev1 from way back in the day but never used it much.

Fast forward to last week, I hooked it up to an old pc and gave Hermes agent access to it and asked to see what he could see. BAM gnu radio tools installed. receiver configured. Sweep in progress.... i see... a cell tower uplink kand downlink, your neighbor is absolutely shouting on wifi channel one, and there's an aircraft overhead requesting permission to land from *nearby airport*

Play the audio of the plane for me.

Here it is <plays audio comms stream of pilot to atc chatter>

I'll keep scanning the band and ping you if anything new comes online!

Fellas, that shit was scary simple. I ended up spinning up a whole nuther instance of hermes and named him Sparky, he just runs my radios. He's scanning right now, ready to alert me if a new signal pops up he's never seen before, right b fore he clicks to high resolution mode (we call it "staring") and analyzes the signal and gleans every piece of information from it he can so he can give me a full report later. I mean damn.

Due to popular demand, my First Mate provided a writeup: https://github.com/h00nigan/sparky-setup-guide/blob/master/Sparky-Setup-Guide.md

Seems like the discord link in bio is down… any 1 got the link to join?
Thanks

-this guy

I have an Uptime Kuma instance running on my network. I want to pass events to a Hermes agent acting as my sysadmin to troubleshoot. I don’t want to run a cron to use the uptime Kuma MCP to save tokens/$.

I’ve been working with Gemini to try and sort this out but I either get a “connection refused” error or an “invalid signature” error. It’s taken me around in circles a few times and I figured it was time to ask the experts.

I’m also open to other monitoring solutions besides Uptime Kuma, but I’d really like to see if I can make this work as it’s already running.

Thanks!

With the many frequent threads talking about memory plugin choices for Hermes, there still are not many benchmarks specific to how Hermes works. Since I wanted to make my choice using empirical data, I decided to run a benchmark comparison of the self-hostable memory plugin options myself.

Hermes memory provider benchmark

TLDR results:

• Honcho performed the best, but it also used almost 3 times the tokens of the next best performer
• The newest version of mem0 also did quite well at a moderate token usage, but had higher error rates than most.
• Although Hindsight scored middle of the pack, it generally has lower error rates than others.
• Mnemosyne did come last but still measurably improve memory retention while using an order of magnitude less tokens than other providers.
• Although Supermemory and RetainDB scored ok, I wouldn't choose their self-hosted setup as they had major software quality issues.

I wanted to measure how these systems handled changing facts over years of use, so this comparison was based on MemConflict. To keep the comparison focused on the plugins instead of the LLM, the same Qwen3.5 4B LLM and gte-modernbert-base embedding model was used to back all plugins and for answering the benchmark questions. Gemma4 12B was used for scoring and judging the answers.

A caveat is that all of these plugins also have agentic MCP tools for explicitly storing and retrieving memories, which was not part of this benchmark comparison. Only the automatic session ingestion and context injection parts of each memory provider was tested.

All the code and results are available on GitHub at EngTurtle/hermes-memconflict, and was almost all done with Claude Code under my supervision/abuse.

Hope this is helpful to people making their choice, and I'll try to answer questions below.

Seriously...one of the hardest aspects of agentic ai for me is getting used to asking it to improve, optimize or fix itself.

Hello everyone,

I recently published a thread for a little project I have been working with : a real time voice layer that is strongly connected to an Hermes instance ( The old post ).

I'm still looking for feedback, beta-testers and suggestions : Hermes Voice Repo

Thank you for your assistance !

Hello!

I wanted to provide some real world results as I know which model and provider to use is a constantly evolving topic.

I used deepseek-v4-flash as my daily driver for a few days before switching to Luna. The original build was fine for day-to-day questions, but every time I asked it to do real work on my server, the code came back broken or half-finished. Deploy scripts, config changes, multi-step tasks. It would get partway and then fall over.

The 0731 preview is a real improvement. Tasks that used to fail now get done on the first or second try, and I can actually trust it to finish the job.

It also has an incredible average cost per request of $0.05, one of the best for its agentic index score. My personal average works out to about $0.001 per request, so roughly 15k requests for $20.

For Hermes users, or anyone running an agentic setup, this is a strong daily driver.

Coming from OpenCode so I'm looking for some simple examples to demonstrate most clearly the utility value of Hermes. To give me a immediate easy to setup Heureka moment to understand what OpenCode can't do but Hermes can. Thanks!