Hermes

Most AI tools forget you the moment you close the tab, and stop working the moment you shut your laptop. Hermes is built the other way round: it runs somewhere permanent, remembers what happened last time, and can do things without you watching.

What it is

An open-source AI agent from Nous Research, officially called Hermes Agent. You give it access to a model, some tools and a place to store notes, and it can then carry out multi-step jobs (checking something on a schedule, processing a file, keeping a record of a project) without being re-prompted each time.

“Open source” here means the code is public and you run it yourself. Nobody hosts it for you, which is the trade: more control, more setup.

It also keeps skills: short written procedures for jobs that come up again. Hermes can write these itself, update them when an approach turns out to be wrong, and remove ones that have gone stale. That is a filing habit rather than the model learning anything, but it does mean a setup you use regularly accumulates more of your context than it had on day one.

You can run several Hermes bots side by side, each with its own memory, skills and settings. Worth knowing that this is the default rather than a shared arrangement: what one bot learns does not reach the others unless you set that up. In practice I have drifted the other way, to one bot with a lot of task-specific skills behind a single memory, which keeps corrections and settings in one place, and my current setup is that arrangement written down. Separate bots still earn their keep where isolation is the point, which mostly means credentials. The comparison with Grok Bot goes into why.

What it needs

A machine that stays on. I have run Hermes both ways, on a VPS and on my Mac, and mine now runs on my own laptop, which I leave on as much as I can. It is a high-end machine, and getting the same performance out of a VPS is costly. A small rented server is still the better answer if you want jobs to keep firing when the laptop sleeps. See what a VPS is if that phrase means nothing to you.

Where it can run, per its official docs (checked 6 November 2026): a desktop app for Apple Silicon Macs and Windows 11, a command-line installer for Mac, Linux and Windows (including a native Windows one run from PowerShell), and an official Docker image for servers. The Mac download is for Apple Silicon only; the docs list Intel Macs as unsupported. The installation docs have the commands, and installing it on a Mac or Windows PC walks through the desktop route with no server.

It also needs access to an AI model, which is where the running cost comes from. The agent itself is free; the thinking is not. You can bring an API key from a model provider, or pay for Nous Portal, Nous Research’s subscription, which its docs describe as covering 300+ models plus built-in tools like web search.

Where it fits

If you want to try an agent, start with something hosted and see if the idea appeals. If you have already decided you want one running permanently and you care where your data sits, this is a reasonable place to land.

Honest limitations

Setup is a real afternoon, not five minutes. Things break when the underlying model changes. And an agent that can act on your behalf is an agent that can act wrongly on your behalf. Give it the narrowest access that does the job, not the widest.

The step-by-step VPS guide covers the setup end to end. If you are not yet sure self-hosting is the right call, Grok Bot vs Hermes weighs it against a managed alternative, and Hermes vs OpenClaw covers the other direction.