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Hermes

NousResearch's open-source agent runtime. Per-agent profiles with built-in auto-retain and direct page tools.

--harness hermes

Hermes runs locally and isolates each agent in its own profile. The CLI creates a Hermes profile for the agent, drops in the hindsight-sda plugin and the agent-knowledge skill, and switches the profile's memory provider to Hindsight so retain happens automatically as you chat.

Who it's for: Use this harness if you run hermes-agent on your own machine and want a self-driving agent with both background auto-retain and explicit knowledge-page tools.

How to run it

  1. 1

    Install hermes-agent

    The CLI checks for the hermes binary on PATH and bails if it's missing. Install it once from NousResearch's install script, then any agent install can target it.

    curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
  2. 2

    Install the agent

    Run the CLI with --harness hermes. It creates (or reuses) a Hermes profile named after the agent, copies the hindsight-sda plugin into the profile, and writes the Hindsight connection into the profile config.

    npx @vectorize-io/self-driving-agents install marketing/seo --harness hermes
  3. 3

    Chat

    Start a session with the agent's profile. Memory retains in the background; the agent-knowledge skill is loaded so you can also work with knowledge pages directly.

    hermes -p marketing-seo chat

Mapping into a Hindsight bank

Where the agent → bank binding lives, and how to change it.

Under the hood

  • The CLI runs hermes profile create <agent> --clone (or reuses an existing profile) and reads the profile path from hermes profile show.
  • It copies the hindsight-sda plugin (plugin.yaml + __init__.py) into <profile>/plugins/hindsight-sda/, and writes <profile>/hindsight/config.json with the API URL, token, and bank ID.
  • It edits <profile>/config.yaml to set memory.provider: hindsight and add hindsight-sda to plugins.enabled — so the bundled Hindsight memory provider auto-retains during chat and the tool plugin exposes knowledge-page operations to the agent.
  • Seed knowledge from the agent directory is ingested as initial memories, and the agent-knowledge skill is dropped into <profile>/skills/agent-knowledge/SKILL.md.

Resources

hermes-agent on GitHub →Hermes docs →