--- slug: / sidebar_position: 0 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." hide_table_of_contents: true displayed_sidebar: docs --- # 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.
Get Started → View on GitHub
## Install **Linux / macOS / WSL2** ```bash curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash ``` **Windows (native, PowerShell)** — *early beta, [details →](/docs/user-guide/windows-native)* ```powershell irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex ``` **Android (Termux)** — same curl one-liner as Linux; the installer auto-detects Termux. See the full **[Installation Guide](/docs/getting-started/installation)** for what the installer does, the per-user vs root layout, and Windows-specific notes. ## 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, WSL2, or native Windows (early beta) | | 📖 **[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, WhatsApp, Teams, or more | | 🔧 **[Tools & Toolsets](/docs/user-guide/features/tools)** | 68 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, Microsoft Teams — 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 ## For LLMs and coding agents Machine-readable entry points to this documentation: - **[`/llms.txt`](/llms.txt)** — curated index of every doc page with short descriptions. ~17 KB, safe to load into an LLM context. - **[`/llms-full.txt`](/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.