Hermes Agent ☤

The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. It's the only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions. Run it on a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure that costs nearly nothing when idle. It's not tied to your laptop — talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM.

Use any model you want — Nous Portal, OpenRouter (200+ models), z.ai/GLM, Kimi/Moonshot, MiniMax, OpenAI, or your own endpoint. Switch with hermes model — no code changes, no lock-in.

Quick Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Works on Linux, macOS, and WSL2. The installer handles everything — Python, Node.js, dependencies, and the hermes command. No prerequisites except git.

Windows: Native Windows is not supported. Please install WSL2 and run the command above.

After installation:

source ~/.bashrc    # reload shell (or: source ~/.zshrc)
hermes              # start chatting!

Getting Started

hermes              # Interactive CLI — start a conversation
hermes model        # Choose your LLM provider and model
hermes tools        # Configure which tools are enabled
hermes config set   # Set individual config values
hermes gateway      # Start the messaging gateway (Telegram, Discord, etc.)
hermes setup        # Run the full setup wizard (configures everything at once)
hermes claw migrate # Migrate from OpenClaw (if coming from OpenClaw)
hermes update       # Update to the latest version
hermes doctor       # Diagnose any issues

📖 Full documentation →

CLI vs Messaging Quick Reference

Hermes has two entry points: start the terminal UI with hermes, or run the gateway and talk to it from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, or Email. Once you're in a conversation, many slash commands are shared across both interfaces.

For the full command lists, see the CLI guide and the Messaging Gateway guide.

Documentation

All documentation lives at hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs:

Migrating from OpenClaw

If you're coming from OpenClaw, Hermes can automatically import your settings, memories, skills, and API keys.

During first-time setup: The setup wizard (hermes setup) automatically detects ~/.openclaw and offers to migrate before configuration begins.

Anytime after install:

hermes claw migrate              # Interactive migration (full preset)
hermes claw migrate --dry-run    # Preview what would be migrated
hermes claw migrate --preset user-data   # Migrate without secrets
hermes claw migrate --overwrite  # Overwrite existing conflicts

What gets imported:

• SOUL.md — persona file
• Memories — MEMORY.md and USER.md entries
• Skills — user-created skills → ~/.hermes/skills/openclaw-imports/
• Command allowlist — approval patterns
• Messaging settings — platform configs, allowed users, working directory
• API keys — allowlisted secrets (Telegram, OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, ElevenLabs)
• TTS assets — workspace audio files
• Workspace instructions — AGENTS.md (with --workspace-target)

See hermes claw migrate --help for all options, or use the openclaw-migration skill for an interactive agent-guided migration with dry-run previews.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! See the Contributing Guide for development setup, code style, and PR process.

Quick start for contributors:

git clone https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent.git
cd hermes-agent
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
uv venv venv --python 3.11
source venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -e ".[all,dev]"
python -m pytest tests/ -q

RL Training (optional): To work on the RL/Tinker-Atropos integration:

git submodule update --init tinker-atropos
uv pip install -e "./tinker-atropos"

Community

• 💬 Discord
• 📚 Skills Hub
• 🐛 Issues
• 💡 Discussions

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Built by Nous Research.