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---
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
---
import Link from "@docusaurus/Link";
# 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",
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flexWrap: "wrap",
}}
>
<Link
to="/getting-started/installation"
style={{
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backgroundColor: "#FFD700",
color: "#07070d",
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>
Get Started →
</Link>
<a
href="https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/desktop"
style={{
display: "inline-block",
padding: "0.6rem 1.2rem",
border: "1px solid rgba(255,215,0,0.2)",
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>
Download Desktop
</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)",
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>
View on GitHub
</a>
</div>
## Install
### Windows or macOS
To easily install the command-line and desktop applications, [download the Hermes Desktop installer](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/desktop) from our website and run it.
### Linux
```bash
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh --include-desktop | bash
```
### Without Hermes Desktop:
For a command-line only install without Hermes Desktop, run:
#### Linux / macOS / WSL2 / Android (Termux)
```bash
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash
```
#### Windows (native)
Run in powershell:
```powershell
iex (irm https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.ps1)
```
See the full **[Installation Guide](/getting-started/installation)** for what the installer does, the per-user vs root layout, and Windows-specific notes.
:::tip Fastest path to a working agent
After installing, run `hermes setup --portal` — one OAuth covers a model plus all four Tool Gateway tools (web search, image generation, TTS, browser). See [Nous Portal](/integrations/nous-portal).
:::
## 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](/getting-started/installation)** | Install in 60 seconds on Linux, macOS, WSL2, or native Windows |
| 📖 **[Quickstart Tutorial](/getting-started/quickstart)** | Your first conversation and key features to try |
| 🗺️ **[Learning Path](/getting-started/learning-path)** | Find the right docs for your experience level |
| ⚙️ **[Configuration](/user-guide/configuration)** | Config file, providers, models, and options |
| 💬 **[Messaging Gateway](/user-guide/messaging)** | Set up Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Teams, or more |
| 🔧 **[Tools & Toolsets](/user-guide/features/tools)** | 60+ built-in tools and how to configure them |
| 🧠 **[Memory System](/user-guide/features/memory)** | Persistent memory that grows across sessions |
| 📚 **[Skills System](/user-guide/features/skills)** | Procedural memory the agent creates and reuses |
| 🔌 **[MCP Integration](/user-guide/features/mcp)** | Connect to MCP servers, filter their tools, and extend Hermes safely |
| 🧭 **[Use MCP with Hermes](/guides/use-mcp-with-hermes)** | Practical MCP setup patterns, examples, and tutorials |
| 🎙️ **[Voice Mode](/user-guide/features/voice-mode)** | Real-time voice interaction in CLI, Telegram, Discord, and Discord VC |
| 🗣️ **[Use Voice Mode with Hermes](/guides/use-voice-mode-with-hermes)** | Hands-on setup and usage patterns for Hermes voice workflows |
| 🎭 **[Personality & SOUL.md](/user-guide/features/personality)** | Define Hermes' default voice with a global SOUL.md |
| 📄 **[Context Files](/user-guide/features/context-files)** | Project context files that shape every conversation |
| 🔒 **[Security](/user-guide/security)** | Command approval, authorization, container isolation |
| 💡 **[Tips & Best Practices](/guides/tips)** | Quick wins to get the most out of Hermes |
| 🏗️ **[Architecture](/developer-guide/architecture)** | How it works under the hood |
| ❓ **[FAQ & Troubleshooting](/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, Weixin, QQ Bot, Yuanbao, BlueBubbles, Home Assistant, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and more — 20+ 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 — one subscription via [Nous Portal](/integrations/nous-portal) bundles all of them
- **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.