Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent framework by Nous Research that runs in your terminal, a native desktop app, messaging platforms, and IDEs. It works with any LLM provider and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and WSL — self-improving through skills, persistent memory across sessions, a multi-platform gateway, and many surfaces driven by one agent core.

This skill is a hub. Load references/hub.md for orientation (scope rule, quick start, key paths, surfaces). Everything task-specific lives in the reference the Routing table names — load it before answering; do not answer detail questions from the body alone.

Global rules

• Never break prompt caching — don't change past context, toolsets, or the system prompt mid-conversation. The only exception is context compression.
• Message role alternation — never two assistant or two user messages in a row; only tool results can repeat.
• No unnecessary clarifying questions. When the user's request is specific enough to act on, execute it. Only ask for clarification when the request is genuinely ambiguous and acting would change behavior in a way the user did not authorize. A path + flag is a directive, not a conversation opener.
• Secrets in .env, settings in config.yaml — never tell a user to put a non-credential setting in .env.
• Profile-safe paths — get_hermes_home() in code, $HERMES_HOME when resolving paths in a session.
• Never hand-edit config.yaml for the user — use hermes config set KEY VAL; a stray indent can corrupt the file and break the live gateway. List-valued keys are still CLI work, but only when the value is passed as a JSON array literal (hermes config set skills.disabled '["a","b"]'); the comma form stores a scalar that every later read treats as one bogus name, so it silently does nothing. Verify with config get <key> --json, which must print an array. The single sanctioned non-CLI writer is the ruamel round-trip, used when the file carries comments the CLI rewrite would destroy.
• Never stop the gateway from inside the gateway process. systemctl --user stop hermes-gateway (or any SIGTERM to the gateway) is blocked: the kill signal propagates to this very process's children, so the command dies before it completes. Restart the gateway with hermes gateway restart from a separate shell outside the running gateway. Desktop-app restarts follow the same rule — kill the desktop process, not the gateway.
• Two theming rules that hold even without loading the reference: apply skins yourself (hermes config set display.skin <name> — every surface repaints live within ~a second; don't tell the user to run /skin), and to tweak one color, edit the ACTIVE skin (hermes skin set <key> <hex>) — never fork default, which drops the palette and resets the background.
• Spawning instances: run additional Hermes processes as fully independent subprocesses — separate sessions, tools, and environments — never as in-process subagents.

Routing

The reference list above is not the feature list — it is the set of topics that need more than their docs page. For everything else Hermes ships, fetch llms.txt and it maps the question to the page that answers it.