Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent by Nous Research. It keeps a memory between sessions, creates skills after complex tasks and improves them while it uses them, and can search its own past conversations. It can start subagents that work in parallel and connect to MCP servers.

You can use it in a terminal app, in the Hermes Desktop app (macOS 12+, Windows 10/11), or from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal or email through one gateway process. It runs on your own computer, a server or in the cloud, with terminal backends such as local, Docker, SSH, Modal and Daytona. A built-in scheduler runs tasks without you.

It works with many model providers, for example Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI or your own endpoint. Hermes Agent is free under the MIT licence; model providers have their own prices. Nous Portal plans: Free $0, Plus $20 per month, Super $100 per month, Ultra $200 per month. Paid plans include monthly credits and access to 200+ models.

Made for

People who want their own AI agent that remembers their projects and can be reached from a terminal, a desktop app or messaging apps, on a laptop, a small server or the cloud. The README also names researchers who generate tool-calling data to train models.

Use cases

• Chat with an AI agent in the terminal or desktop app
• Talk to your agent from Telegram, Discord, Slack or WhatsApp
• Schedule daily reports, backups and briefings in plain language
• Split work across isolated subagents that run in parallel
• Run the agent on a server, in Docker or over SSH
• Generate tool-calling trajectories for model training

An alternative to

• Claude Code

  Open source (MIT), and also works through chat apps such as Telegram, Discord and Slack.

• OpenAI Codex

  Runs in a terminal, a desktop app or chat apps; the agent is free and the Nous Portal plan is optional.