Open-source Self-improving AI Agent | Generated by AI

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Here’s a rundown of what Hermes Agent is:

Hermes Agent is an open-source, self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. Key points:

  1. Self-improving loop — It learns from conversations: creates skills from experience, improves them during use, persists memory across sessions, and builds a user model over time. That’s the core differentiator vs. a plain chatbot wrapper.

  2. Model-agnostic — Works with OpenRouter (200+ models), OpenAI, Anthropic, Nous Portal, Xiaomi MiMo, HuggingFace, and custom endpoints. Switch with hermes model, no lock-in.

  3. Multi-platform — One gateway process serves Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Email, and the CLI itself. You can talk to it from your phone via Telegram while it runs on a cloud VM.

  4. Two interfaces:
    • CLI (hermes) — terminal UI with multiline editing, slash commands, autocomplete, streaming tool output
    • Gateway (hermes gateway start) — messaging platform bridge

  5. 40+ built-in tools — terminal, file ops, web search, browser, image gen, TTS, cron scheduling, subagent delegation, etc. Tools are organized into toolsets you can enable/disable.

  6. Skills system — Procedural memory stored as SKILL.md files. The agent creates skills after complex tasks, then reuses them. Compatible with agentskills.io open standard.

  7. Runs anywhere — Terminal backends: local, Docker, SSH, Modal (serverless), Daytona, Singularity, Vercel Sandbox. Can run on a $5 VPS or a GPU cluster.

  8. Research-ready — Batch trajectory generation and compression for training future tool-calling models.

  9. Built-in cron — Schedule tasks in natural language, deliver results to any connected platform.

  10. OpenClaw migration — If you used OpenClaw (a predecessor), hermes claw migrate imports settings, memories, skills, and API keys.

The project structure centers around run_agent.py (the AIAgent class with the core conversation loop) and cli.py (the interactive CLI). Tools auto-discover via tools/registry.py. The gateway lives in gateway/ with per-platform adapters.

License: MIT. Built by Nous Research.

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