Hermes Agent Documentation

The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research ↗. The only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions.

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Windows or macOS

To easily install the command-line and desktop applications, download the Hermes Desktop installer ↗ from our website and run it.

Without Hermes Desktop:

For a command-line only install without Hermes Desktop, run:

Linux / macOS / WSL2 / Android (Termux)

curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash

Windows (native)

Run in powershell:

iex (irm https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.ps1)

See the full Installation Guide for what the installer does, the per-user vs root layout, and Windows-specific notes. For the complete platform support matrix, see Platform Support.

It's not a coding copilot tethered to an IDE or a chatbot wrapper around a single API. It's an autonomous agent that gets more capable the longer it runs. It lives wherever you put it — a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure (Daytona, Modal) that costs nearly nothing when idle. Talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM you never SSH into yourself. It's not tied to your laptop.

• A closed learning loop — Agent-curated memory with periodic nudges, autonomous skill creation, skill self-improvement during use, FTS5 cross-session recall with LLM summarization, and Honcho ↗ dialectic user modeling
• Runs anywhere, not just your laptop — 6 terminal backends: local, Docker, SSH, Daytona, Singularity, Modal. Daytona and Modal offer serverless persistence — your environment hibernates when idle, costing nearly nothing
• Lives where you do — CLI, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix, Mattermost, Email, SMS, DingTalk, Feishu, WeCom, Weixin, QQ Bot, Yuanbao, BlueBubbles, Home Assistant, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and more — 20+ platforms from one gateway
• Built by model trainers — Created by Nous Research ↗, the lab behind Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche. Works with Nous Portal ↗, OpenRouter ↗, OpenAI, or any endpoint
• Scheduled automations — Built-in cron with delivery to any platform
• Delegates & parallelizes — Spawn isolated subagents for parallel workstreams. Programmatic Tool Calling via execute_code collapses multi-step pipelines into single inference calls
• Open standard skills — Compatible with agentskills.io ↗. Skills are portable, shareable, and community-contributed via the Skills Hub
• Full web control — Search, extract, browse, vision, image generation, TTS — one subscription via Nous Portal bundles all of them
• MCP support — Connect to any MCP server for extended tool capabilities
• Research-ready — Batch processing, trajectory export, RL training with Atropos. Built by Nous Research ↗ — the lab behind Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche models

Machine-readable entry points to this documentation:

• /llms.txt ↗ — curated index of every doc page with short descriptions. ~17 KB, safe to load into an LLM context.
• /llms-full.txt ↗ — every doc page concatenated into a single markdown file for one-shot ingestion. ~1.8 MB.

Both files also resolve at /docs/llms.txt and /docs/llms-full.txt. Generated fresh on every deploy.