---
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title: "Hermes Agent Documentation"
description: "The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. A built-in learning loop that creates skills from experience, improves them during use, and remembers across sessions."
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---

# Hermes Agent

The self-improving AI agent built by [Nous Research](https://nousresearch.com). 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.

<div style={{display: 'flex', gap: '1rem', marginBottom: '2rem', flexWrap: 'wrap'}}>
  <a href="/docs/getting-started/installation" style={{display: 'inline-block', padding: '0.6rem 1.2rem', backgroundColor: '#FFD700', color: '#07070d', borderRadius: '8px', fontWeight: 600, textDecoration: 'none'}}>Get Started →</a>
  <a href="https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent" style={{display: 'inline-block', padding: '0.6rem 1.2rem', border: '1px solid rgba(255,215,0,0.2)', borderRadius: '8px', textDecoration: 'none'}}>View on GitHub</a>
</div>

## What is Hermes Agent?

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.

## Quick Links

| | |
|---|---|
| 🚀 **[Installation](/docs/getting-started/installation)** | Install in 60 seconds on Linux, macOS, or WSL2 |
| 📖 **[Quickstart Tutorial](/docs/getting-started/quickstart)** | Your first conversation and key features to try |
| 🗺️ **[Learning Path](/docs/getting-started/learning-path)** | Find the right docs for your experience level |
| ⚙️ **[Configuration](/docs/user-guide/configuration)** | Config file, providers, models, and options |
| 💬 **[Messaging Gateway](/docs/user-guide/messaging)** | Set up Telegram, Discord, Slack, or WhatsApp |
| 🔧 **[Tools & Toolsets](/docs/user-guide/features/tools)** | 47 built-in tools and how to configure them |
| 🧠 **[Memory System](/docs/user-guide/features/memory)** | Persistent memory that grows across sessions |
| 📚 **[Skills System](/docs/user-guide/features/skills)** | Procedural memory the agent creates and reuses |
| 🔌 **[MCP Integration](/docs/user-guide/features/mcp)** | Connect to MCP servers, filter their tools, and extend Hermes safely |
| 🧭 **[Use MCP with Hermes](/docs/guides/use-mcp-with-hermes)** | Practical MCP setup patterns, examples, and tutorials |
| 🎙️ **[Voice Mode](/docs/user-guide/features/voice-mode)** | Real-time voice interaction in CLI, Telegram, Discord, and Discord VC |
| 🗣️ **[Use Voice Mode with Hermes](/docs/guides/use-voice-mode-with-hermes)** | Hands-on setup and usage patterns for Hermes voice workflows |
| 🎭 **[Personality & SOUL.md](/docs/user-guide/features/personality)** | Define Hermes' default voice with a global SOUL.md |
| 📄 **[Context Files](/docs/user-guide/features/context-files)** | Project context files that shape every conversation |
| 🔒 **[Security](/docs/user-guide/security)** | Command approval, authorization, container isolation |
| 💡 **[Tips & Best Practices](/docs/guides/tips)** | Quick wins to get the most out of Hermes |
| 🏗️ **[Architecture](/docs/developer-guide/architecture)** | How it works under the hood |
| ❓ **[FAQ & Troubleshooting](/docs/reference/faq)** | Common questions and solutions |

## Key Features

- **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](https://github.com/plastic-labs/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, BlueBubbles, Home Assistant — 15+ platforms from one gateway
- **Built by model trainers** — Created by [Nous Research](https://nousresearch.com), the lab behind Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche. Works with [Nous Portal](https://portal.nousresearch.com), [OpenRouter](https://openrouter.ai), 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](https://agentskills.io). Skills are portable, shareable, and community-contributed via the Skills Hub
- **Full web control** — Search, extract, browse, vision, image generation, TTS
- **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](https://nousresearch.com) — the lab behind Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche models
