Open agent

Hermes Agent

Self-improving personal agent from Nous Research: it writes skills from experience, keeps curated memory, and runs on many backends.

Checked

★ Most talked-about open agent on X this month

Why Hermes Agent stands out

by Nous Research · MIT

Self-improving personal agent from Nous Research: it writes skills from experience, keeps curated memory, and runs on many backends.

GitHub stars
254,311
Latest release
v0.22.2Oct 15, 2026
Runs
Local + cloud
X posts this month
23of 123 in our brief

Top features

  • Closed learning loopautonomous skill creation, self-improving skills, FTS5 cross-session search
  • Kanban board for coordinating multiple agents
  • Batch trajectory generation for training tool-calling models

What people are building with it

Bill Watson@xbillwatsonx
Runs Hermes on open-weight models: coded a game, built his website, does server maintenance and security
witcheer@witcheer
"Hermes Agent is driving my Microduck!", a robot walking 0.58 m from a single sentence
Md Ismail Šojal 🕷️@0x0SojalSec
Fully local on "Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on an RTX 5060 Ti (16GB) + offload 96GB RAM"

Basis: in our X Brief (Sep 16 – Oct 16, 2026), 23 of 123 tallied posts were about Hermes, the most of any agent. OpenClaw was close behind with 22. That's a narrow lead in one month of posts, not a quality ranking. OpenClaw has more GitHub stars.

Hermes on X this month

8release posts
8use-case posts
7complaints or questions

Counts come from the X Brief tally (Sep 16 – Oct 16, 2026). The brief notes that most complaints are about upgrades and memory configuration.

Hermes vs OpenClaw Full comparison →

Hermes Agent compared with OpenClaw
Hermes AgentOpenClaw
GitHub stars254,311392,167
X Brief posts2322
LicenseMITMIT
RunsLocal + cloudLocal + cloud (unverified)
Latest releasev0.22.2 · Oct 15, 2026v2026.10.4 · Oct 16, 2026
CostFree and open source (MIT)Free (MIT)
Stars
254,311 api.github.com/repos/NousResearch/hermes-agent · checked
License
MIT
Runs
Local + cloudSeven terminal backends: local, Docker, SSH, Singularity, Modal, Daytona, Vercel Sandbox.
Latest release
v0.22.2 ·

What it is

Self-improving personal agent from Nous Research: it writes skills from experience, keeps curated memory, and runs on many backends.

X account: maker account; @Hermes_Agent is an unrelated crypto project, not official

Install

  • curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash
  • Windows: iex (irm https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.ps1)
  • Android/Termux APT repo

raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/HEAD/README.md · checked

Models

Any model: Nous Portal (300+ models), OpenRouter, OpenAI, custom endpoints and others; switch with `hermes model`.

raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/HEAD/README.md · checked

Cost

Free and open source (MIT). Bring your own keys, or use a Nous Portal subscription, which bundles models plus a Tool Gateway (web search, image gen, TTS, cloud browser). Portal lists per-token model prices.

Unverified: Nous Portal subscription price not captured

portal.nousresearch.com · checked

Features

Use cases

Cybrnut@CybrNut
"Hermes + DeepSeek Flash … I used it to gamify learning about Linux Networking Skills" for a teenager
Md Ismail Šojal 🕷️@0x0SojalSec
Fully local on "Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on an RTX 5060 Ti (16GB) + offload 96GB RAM"
HOPE | Engineer.@rlaope
Claimed result: "Hermes alone: $4.29, 23 min. Hermes + oh-my-hermes: $0.66, 5 min"

figures self-reported, unverified

zack0x01@zack0x01_
Built a pentesting agent for recon, vulnerability hunting and reporting (video)
Abo-El Makarem Shohoud@karem_shohud
Built 'Hermes Mobile', an unofficial open-source Android client (chat, model switching, files over Tailscale) using Hermes
Bikash | Hermes Super-Intel@BkashJosi
"100+ tested workflows with full code", an example archive
Tony Simons@tonysimons
"Hermes Fleet for iOS has been APPROVED for External TestFlight", built to "manage my Hermes Agent fleet from my iPhone"
witcheer@witcheer
"Hermes Agent is driving my Microduck!", a robot walking 0.58 m from a single sentence
tonbi@tonbistudio
A Claude subscription used inside Hermes via the Direct SDK plugin, with an install video
Machina@EXM7777
One VPS running "my Hermes agent, Claude Code, Codex"
Bill Watson@xbillwatsonx
Runs Hermes on open-weight models: coded a game, built his website, does server maintenance and security
Kyz@minhng92
Burned 1B tokens in 30 days with Hermes; thread on what he built
Theo Stowell@theostowell
Wired the Kanban view to Hermes for an automated short-form content pipeline for his app

Complaints and issues

FAQ

Do I need a Nous subscription?

No. It works with any provider; Nous Portal is an optional single-login alternative to collecting separate keys.

raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/HEAD/README.md · checked

Does it run on Windows?

Yes, natively via the PowerShell installer; WSL2 also works.

raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/HEAD/README.md · checked

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