How Working Directory Affects Hermes

How Working Directory Affects Hermes | Generated by AI

Home 2026.05

Good question. Here’s how working directory actually affects Hermes:

The mechanism: TERMINAL_CWD

When you launch hermes from a directory, that directory becomes TERMINAL_CWD — an env var that every tool reads. It’s the base for:

Terminal commands — bash commands run with cwd=TERMINAL_CWD (terminal_tool.py:1033)
File operations — read_file, write_file, search_files resolve relative paths against it (file_tools.py:122-126)
execute_code — Python scripts run in TERMINAL_CWD by default (code_execution_tool.py:1230)
Context files — AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules loaded from cwd
Subagent delegation — child agents inherit the parent’s cwd

For search/grep specifically:

The search_files tool uses ripgrep (rg). When you pass a relative path like . or src/, it resolves against TERMINAL_CWD. When you pass an absolute path, it searches that directly. Ripgrep is extremely fast (~10x faster than grep), so the directory size barely matters for normal project sizes. A 100K-file monorepo still searches in milliseconds.

The real impacts are:

Context loading — This is the big one. If you launch from /Users/lzwjava/projects/hermes-agent, it loads that project’s AGENTS.md. If you launch from ~/projects/ww, it loads ww’s context. Different cwd = different system prompt context.
Relative path resolution — All relative paths in tool calls resolve from cwd. read_file("src/foo.py") means different things from different directories.
Project-scoped venv — execute_code in project mode uses the venv from cwd, so you get different Python packages depending on where you launched.

Does it slow things down?

No meaningful impact on grep/search speed. Ripgrep is I/O-bound and blazing fast. The only scenario where cwd matters for performance is if you accidentally launch from $HOME or / — then search_files with a relative path could traverse your entire filesystem. But that’s a user error, not a Hermes design issue.

TL;DR: Cwd affects what context and paths Hermes works with, not how fast it runs. Launch from your project root and everything is fine.

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