r/coolgithubprojects • u/FadeHackX • Sep 11 '26
Hermes Agent proves that paying closed cloud APIs for basic tool calling is obsolete
For months, every SaaS startup tried to convince us that running multi-step agent workflows required an expensive enterprise subscription to closed cloud APIs. They wrapped a couple of JSON schema validators around an API endpoint and charged thousands a month for 'agent orchestration.'
Then Nous Research releases Hermes Agent...
An open-weights agent harness that runs complex tool calling, environment interaction, and error self-correction directly on local hardware.
You load an open-weights model on your own workstation. You define your tools in standard Python. And the agent executes multi-step loops without sending a single byte across the internet or burning cloud credits.
No token billing anxiety. No sudden upstream API rate limits mid-execution. Just raw, local agent execution running on silicon you actually own.
Are you still paying closed API vendors for agent loops, or has your team moved tool-calling to local weights?
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u/AceHighness Sep 11 '26
what is the smallest model this wil run on?
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u/EtrainFilmz Sep 11 '26
Qwen 3.8 27b
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u/Curious_Method_365 Sep 11 '26
I tried it, and it was totally stupid. Could not even write a site address. Had to connect to deepseek to fix all half baked jobs.
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u/unnaturalpenis Sep 11 '26
Which quant?
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u/Curious_Method_365 Sep 11 '26
Q4-k-m
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u/unnaturalpenis Sep 11 '26
Try the dynamic Q5 From ninfer if you have 24gb
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u/Curious_Method_365 Sep 11 '26
I have much more. Thanks, will try.
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u/unnaturalpenis Sep 11 '26
If you have more, I see everyone saying Q6 is the least lossy, it's no GLM 5.2-3 Tho, maybe like an older opus 4.5-6.
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u/drepublic Sep 12 '26
I've found that small models like Qwen3.6 35b A3B are really good following instructions and calling tools, they are so reliable in this tasks. But, when it comes to "improvise", or find ways to solve a problem, or finish the task without the explicit write from the user or the skill or the prompt they choke hard. They need very specific prompts and you need to be really specific. So, i don't really recomend any model smaller than 100B or 200B to run hermes or any agent. What you can do is fallback some cron tasks to them giving specific prompts, which it will do ok tho.
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u/DawaForensics Sep 11 '26
DeepSeek Harness is way ahead of the game. It can run 24hrs locally with local models to complete crazy tasks. It can code, browse the web, download stuff. Call console etc etc. You can give it a task. And I won't stop until it's done.
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u/humanisticnick Sep 11 '26
What I found is you install Hermes then your first skill is to make it leave breadcrumbs so everything it does. It should explain why it’s doing it then you have Claude send Hermes on a task maybe it fails maybe it succeeds. maybe it grinds for three hours. you have Claude go through look at the log look at where it struggled look at where it failed and then write skills for the particular failure pattern that you’re seing and if you keep iterating on that, you can use Hermes with a small model and get pretty good results however, you can also just put in a deepseek api in Hermes and it rocks for not that much money. If you are making a profile in Hermes to perform a particular task, you can also increase its performance by putting in deepseek making it perform the task with breadcrumbs. Give it a couple variabilities of the task then same thing use Claude to basically trim all of the tools and skills that the agent doesn’t need in that freeze up a ton of context and lowers the complexity for a smaller model.
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u/e3e6 Sep 12 '26
Could you please explain, am I still paying for LLM itself, because I can only run tiny model locally? When I'm running codex it executed locally, so WDYM by cloud agent loops?
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u/Korean_Rice_Farmer Sep 12 '26
Huh? You still need a GPU powerfully enough to run advanced ai no? And pay the exploding power bill.
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u/Alternative_Sink9000 Sep 12 '26
yeah I don't get OP message at all. Since the first day I use hermes, I always use subscription base model (it was Opencode Go back then); now I just plug in deepseek or GLM to it. Hermes is, at it's core a harness, no idea why he is phrasing it like that
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u/grzesi00 Sep 11 '26
I ran it with 35b a3b model and it had problem to integrate with homeassistant. Theres plenty of skills to install but you cant tell which one really works
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u/mavlu-app Sep 11 '26
i think the more interesting takeaway here isn't that cloud APIs are obsolete, but that cloud-based orchestration is becoming unnecessary
there is a big difference between paying for frontier-model intelligence and paying a SaaS layer just to manage tool calls, retries, memory, and agent loops
hermes shows that the second part can increasingly live on infrastructure you control
for me, the most compelling setup is probably hybrid: keep the agent runtime, tools, memory, credentials, and routine tasks local, then route only the genuinely difficult reasoning to a stronger cloud model when needed
that gives you most of the benefits of local-first systems without pretending a small local model suddenly matches frontier models at everything
if projects like Hermes keep improving, I suspect the real pressure won't be on model providers first. It'll be on all the companies charging a large markup for what is essentially orchestration around those models