Section 1
What is the Hermes Agent?
Hermes is a new AI agent from a research lab called Nous Research.
It is the fastest project in GitHub history to hit 100,000 stars. Five major releases in the last 20 days. Hundreds of contributors. People are already calling it the OpenClaw killer.
Here is the easiest way to think about how it differs from the other agents you have heard of:
Claude Code
The AI that lives in your terminal and helps you write code while you sit at your desk. You drive it. It does the work.
OpenClaw
The agent you message through Telegram or Slack to run tasks for you. Multi-channel, but it forgets between sessions, eats tokens with no visibility, and the gateway breaks all the time.
Hermes
Different. It lives on a tiny server. You text it from anywhere. It remembers everything. And every time it completes a task, it writes a new skill for itself and never forgets.
That last part is the unlock. Most agents do not actually learn. Hermes does.
Section 2
Why it matters
The clearest pitch for Hermes comes from people who already migrated off OpenClaw. They keep listing the same three reasons.
Built-in memory
Every time Hermes completes a task successfully, it writes to its own SQLite database. You do not have to tell it the same thing twice. It also searches its own logs in real time. So if you forgot to save something to an environment variable but mentioned it in a chat three days ago, it can dig it back out.
It actually stays running
OpenClaw users were restarting their gateway once an hour. Hermes goes weeks without a restart.
Real token visibility
You can see exactly what you are spending. Plug it into OpenRouter and you can route to cheap models (or genuinely free ones) for repeatable tasks. One user dropped his token spend from $130 every 5 days down to about $10 every 5 days. A 90% cut, doing the same work.
The other thing most explainers bury: Hermes ships with 40+ tools and the most popular skills pre-installed. Apple Notes, Reminders, iMessage, Find My, browser, web search, image generation, cron scheduling, home assistant. You do not have to scavenger-hunt a skills hub before you can do anything useful.
Section 3 — New in May 2026
What just shipped: the 8 new features and how to activate each
Nous Research just shipped the biggest update Hermes has had since launch. 8 new features in one drop. If you already have Hermes installed, this is the section to start with. If you do not, skim this first to see what you are about to unlock, then jump to the install section below.
Before any of these work, update to the latest version. In your Hermes session, just say: "Hermes, update to the latest version." Hit enter.
Session-recall memory
Hermes now remembers every past session and lets you pull from any of it without burning tokens. It indexes sessions programmatically, not through AI tokens, so it is instant and free.
Try
"What were we working on on May 10?" Background tasks
Run multiple jobs in parallel while you keep chatting with the main agent. Stack as many as you want.
Command
/background research the top 10 AI agent startups from the last 30 days Grok OAuth
Plug your existing Grok 4.3 subscription into Hermes as a provider. If you already pay for X / Grok, you can reuse that auth inside Hermes and save on tokens. Also required for features 4 and 7.
Native X tweet search
Once Grok OAuth is wired up, Hermes can search X in real time for trending tweets, breaking news, and live research without leaving the chat.
Enable
"Anytime I ask about posts, use Grok 4.3." Native Codex CLI coding
Hermes can spin up Codex as a worker for actual vibe coding, even as a background task. Saves Opus tokens since you do not pay your orchestrator model to write all the code itself.
Command
/background use codex to build a 3D first-person shooter using three.js in a single HTML file Computer use
Your agent can now see your screen and click around. Anything you can do on your computer, it can do. Pull the target app open side-by-side and watch it click through. (Still gets times slightly wrong sometimes — review before walking away.)
Try
"Look at my calendar and add an event for 7pm called film video." Native AI video generation
Text-to-video and image-to-video right inside Telegram via Grok Imagine. No more bouncing to Higgsfield, Runway, or any other video tool.
Enable
hermes tools Run in your terminal, enable the video generation tool, sign in to Grok, then text: "Generate me a short video of [thing]."
Auto-kanban task generation
Drop a goal into Hermes and it breaks it into subtasks and assigns each one to a sub-agent automatically. The morning routine: dump your day's to-dos into Triage, go make coffee, come back to 40 subtasks already in flight.
Open
hermes dashboard Open the kanban view and add a task to Triage.
If you want a visual walkthrough of any of these, Alex Finn's video on the update is the best resource right now: youtube.com/watch?v=8iZUyE7SlXo.
Section 4
How to set it up
This is the whole point of this guide. The official Hermes quickstart from Nous Research is one command on Mac, Linux, or Windows (WSL).
Official Quickstart
hermes-agent.nousresearch.com
One command. Mac, Linux, or WSL.
A few practical notes before you start:
Mac users: install Xcode Developer Tools first
If you have never set them up, run this in your terminal:
xcode-select --install Pick your model with hermes model
This command brings up the provider picker. OpenRouter is the easiest way to keep costs low and see exactly what each model costs per million tokens. Free models rotate through too (NVIDIA NemoTron was free as of last week).
You can skip the onboarding
Just close out of it. You do not need to configure everything before you start using it.
Once it is installed, type hermes in your terminal. You are in.
Section 5
What to do on day one
The trap with any new agent is to spend three weeks customizing it instead of using it. Do not do that.
Here are the prompts to run on day one to start building habit and memory.
Audit your day
Build it tools while you sleep
The point is not a perfect answer. The point is to default to your agent for daily work. The more you use it, the more it learns your patterns, and the better the answers get.
Section 6
Skills worth installing first
Hermes ships with the basics. After a week of using it, install these three in order.
Obsidian
Turns your Hermes context into a clean daily dashboard. Markdown files the agent organizes for you. Readable on your phone, your desktop, anywhere. The fastest way to actually see what your agent knows about you.
Honcho memory
Hermes has memory caps by default (around 1,300 tokens between SOUL.md, MEMORY.md, and USER.md). Honcho extends that with proper user-modeling on top. Install it once you start to feel the memory limit pinching.
G-Stack
Built by Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator. Takes the YC startup methodology (weekly retros, founder questions, deciding what to ship) and bolts it onto your agent. If you are building anything, install it. Free.
Section 7
One more thing: run it on Android
You can also run Hermes on an Android phone using Termux and the Termux API. That gives the agent access to SMS, the camera, sensors, brightness, vibration, basically every part of the phone.
People are running social media automation and SMS-based 2FA flows on cheap Android phones instead of a $600 Mac Mini. Worth knowing about once you are past the basics.
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