What it is
Hermes Agent is an AI agent from Nous Research. It has a full terminal interface for coding and everyday tasks, and it learns as it works: it keeps memory across sessions, writes reusable skills after complex tasks and can search its past conversations.
A background process called the gateway lets you talk to it from messaging apps such as Matrix, Telegram, Discord or Signal, and it can run scheduled jobs on its own. It works with Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic and other providers, or your own endpoint.
Why it’s here
- Remembers. Memory and skills carry over from one session to the next.
- Reachable from your phone. Through the gateway, you can message it from Matrix and other chat apps.
- Any model. Switch providers and models with
hermes model.
On CoreDesktop
CoreDesktop installs Hermes Agent with its official installer from hermes-agent.nousresearch.com, skipping its setup questions and background service, and update runs hermes update to keep it current. Typing hermes or hermes-agent runs it in CoreDesktop’s AI sandbox: it can change files only in the directory you start it from and in ~/.hermes, and reach only AI providers and common developer sites. Its sandbox allows local sockets, so it can talk to its gateway, but hides your session’s D-Bus and SSH agent, Docker, Tailscale, X11, tmux and browsers. To run it without the sandbox, type unsandboxed hermes.
If you set up the gateway, CoreDesktop runs it in the sandbox too, and lets it reach the Matrix server in Hermes’ settings. For other messaging services, add their domains to ~/.config/coredesktop/sandbox/hermes.json. Before the first use, run configure hermes and choose Nous Portal, where one sign-in covers the model, web search, images and more, or another provider such as OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic or your own endpoint.