Hermes Agent - Current Functionalities

Created: 2026-05-16 | Tags: hermes, infrastructure, reference

Hermes Agent (Nous Research) is an open-source AI agent framework running on Linux via Telegram gateway. This page documents current setup and capabilities.

Architecture Overview

• Host: Linux 6.8.0-generic (bare metal VPS)
• Model: DeepSeek Chat via DeepSeek provider
• Interface: Telegram DM (primary), CLI (secondary)
• Installation: Git clone at ~/.hermes/hermes-agent/
• Config: ~/.hermes/config.yaml, secrets in ~/.hermes/.env

Core Capabilities

Conversation & Memory

• Persistent cross-session memory (2,200 char limit, auto-consolidates)
• User profile store (1,375 char limit)
• Session search across past conversations (FTS5-backed SQLite)
• Context compression at token limit threshold

Toolsets (always enabled)

Multi-Platform Gateway

Connected to Telegram (primary). Supported platforms include: Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix, Email, SMS, Mattermost, Home Assistant, DingTalk, Feishu, WeCom, BlueBubbles (iMessage), Weixin (WeChat), API Server, Webhooks.

Scheduled Cron Jobs

Style preference for digest: title (with link), author, date, code changes stats, summary. No emoji, consistent formatting.

Skills System

Agent-created procedural knowledge stored as SKILL.md files in ~/.hermes/skills/. Organized by category:

• autonomous-ai-agents/ -- hermes-agent, claude-code, codex, opencode
• creative/ -- architecture-diagram, ascii-art, excalidraw, manim-video, p5js, pixel-art, sketch
• data-science/ -- jupyter-live-kernel
• devops/ -- data-processing-toolkit, kanban-orchestrator, kanban-worker, self-hosted-gitops, self-hosted-services, webhook-subscriptions
• github/ -- codebase-inspection, github-auth, github-code-review, github-issues, github-pr-workflow, github-repo-management
• media/ -- youtube-content, spotify, gif-search
• mlops/ -- huggingface-hub, llama-cpp, vllm, etc.
• note-taking/ -- mdbook-wiki, obsidian
• productivity/ -- google-workspace, notion, linear, airtable, nano-pdf, ocr-and-documents, powerpoint
• software-development/ -- plan, spike, test-driven-development, writing-plans, subagent-driven-development, systematic-debugging, requesting-code-review

Skills auto-curated: stale skills archived, usage tracked, backed up before deletion.

Subagent Delegation

Spawn child agents with isolated context and terminal session:

• Single: delegate_task(goal, context, toolsets)
• Batch: up to 3 concurrent children (configurable)
• Roles: leaf (default, cannot delegate further) or orchestrator (can spawn workers, depth limited)
• Durable fallback: use cronjob or terminal(background=True) for work that must outlive session

Spawning Extra Hermes Instances

Independent Hermes processes via tmux for long-running missions:

• One-shot: hermes chat -q '...'
• Interactive: tmux session with hermes + worktree (-w) for parallel agents
• Use case: independent coding agents working on separate branches

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Native MCP client: connect stdio or HTTP MCP servers via config.yaml; tools auto-discovered.

Profiles

Isolated Hermes instances with separate config, sessions, skills, memory. Clone from defaults, switch at runtime.

Security Features

• Command approval: manual (default), smart (AI-assisted), off (yolo)
• Secret redaction: off by default, API key masking via config
• PII redaction: hashes user IDs in gateway context
• Website blocklist: restrict browsing domains
• Read-only rootfs (planned for containerized deployment)

Voice

• STT: auto-transcribe voice messages (local faster-whisper, Groq, OpenAI, Mistral)
• TTS: Edge (free default), ElevenLabs, OpenAI, MiniMax, Mistral, NeuTTS (local)
• Voice-to-voice mode: /voice on

Gateway Features

• Multi-session management within Telegram (DM topics)
• Home channel configuration
• Message queuing for busy agents
• Command approval prompts over DM
• Cross-platform fan-out delivery

Key Paths

~/.hermes/config.yaml                Main configuration
~/.hermes/.env                        API keys and secrets
~/.hermes/skills/                     Installed skills
~/.hermes/sessions/                   Session transcripts
~/.hermes/logs/                       Gateway and error logs
~/.hermes/auth.json                   OAuth tokens and credential pools
~/.hermes/hermes-agent/               Source code (git-installed)
~/.hermes/migration-plan-reference.md Infrastructure migration plan

Related

• Hermes Cronjobs
• GitHub Daily Digest
• ArXiv Weekly Digest
• Infrastructure & Planned Changes