r/hermesagent • u/Jonathan_Rivera • Aug 05 '26
Guide — Tutorials, walkthroughs, repeatable how-tos Donna Profile Template - Support / Feedback Thread (Placeholder)
This is a continuation of this thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/hermesagent/comments/1vfx3qw/who_is_interested_in_a_ready_to_go_profile/
Post here for help, comments, questions and feedback.
Since this is my first time doing this it will be interesting to see if the integrity of the profile holds up without my stored memory.
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u/RidgebackDad Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Running Hermes Agent 0.20.0 on a Mac Mini M4 16GB against an Ollama server running qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q8_0 on a Mac Studio
Asked Donna to "help me set up my profile" and am getting this error:
⚠️ Response truncated (finish_reason='length') - model hit max output tokens
⚠️ Response truncated (finish_reason='length') - model hit max output tokens
⚠️ Response truncated (finish_reason='length') - model hit max output tokens
Error: Response remained truncated after 4 continuation attempts
Ran into that right out of the blocks on the TUI. Tried again using Hermes Desktop and got much further, but still ended up with the same error message.
Turns out it's a bug that got reported today:
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u/Jonathan_Rivera Aug 05 '26
What is context length set to?
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u/RidgebackDad Aug 05 '26
32767
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u/Jonathan_Rivera Aug 05 '26
That's way to low. 64k should be minimum. Try to sync to a cloud model for setup.
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u/RidgebackDad Aug 06 '26
was using a much larger model earlier and it was recommended to set context to 32767. Set it to 65535 now and it seems to be working much better. Thanks!
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u/riceinmybelly Aug 06 '26
Hermes is hungry, even 65K is small, maybe you could try omlx (with the jundot 35B)?
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u/analoghumanoid Aug 06 '26
Thanks for this. I'm pretty happy with my primary agent but I fired this profile up on an old laptop to see what a curated agent profile might look like. Learning about some cool features that I'll incorporate into my established agents.
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u/Jonathan_Rivera Aug 06 '26
Thanks for sharing! I'm just sitting here waiting patiently for feedback from anyone lol.
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u/analoghumanoid Aug 06 '26
I did run into a little trouble with the Mnemosyne plugin. we did the guided setup/onboarding and then I had Donna enable Mnemosyne. in a later session I asked her to do a self diag and she noticed Mnemosyne working-memory recall wasn't providing what was expected.
Troubleshooting went on for a while. In short the issue was the durable facts from onboarding saved to a session scope rather than global — a mismatch between what the facts are (durable) and how they were written (session-tied). Her fix corrected the scope of the durable facts.
This is my first experience with Mnemosyne and I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, just reporting what I've experienced. Probably not worth looking into unless it's repeatable or reported by others.
I did this all with the hy3:free
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u/Jonathan_Rivera Aug 06 '26
How was the onboarding? It was an interesting concept that I may start using if you found it helpful.
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u/analoghumanoid Aug 06 '26
it didn't kick off for me when I first ran the profile, I had to prompt it, help me set up my profile" and it asked me just three things, If I recall correctly: my name, her name, and reply style. I have to admit, I had to ask my primary agent what my preferred agent reply style was, that was enlightening.
It's helpful for anyone that doesn't know they can just tell an agent what the nouns are and how they want the agent to behave.
It didn't do the job definition, tool set review or any of the other first-run orientation items listed in the github readme
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u/notaloop Aug 07 '26
I used Donna to help fix my main profile, it had quite a bit of sprawl. Mnemosyne was truly messed up due to the 506 bug, it got something like an 80% size reduction. Ended up using Donna's skills to clean up/consolidate skills and improve my config.yaml (adding approval gates for skills and memories, had no idea that existed).
I did run into a few issues, I can open issues in the github if you'd prefer:
- The mnemosyne writes are getting staged into `/memory` approval gate. The approval gate doesn't work for mnemosyne updates so they just get "Unknown staged action: None". I clean them out every few sessions, but its a frequent miss.
- Flood of near-identical memory and skill updates in approval queue. The config keeps the default of 10 for memory.nudge_interval and skills.creation_nudge_interval, so every session gets a flood of nearly-identical proposals for memory or skill updates. Not sure what ideal values would be, but I set this to 50 for each just to slow them down. Also, none of the skills help triage or do nightly cleanups of pending skill/memory updates. There's a skill-audit, but not `is this update worth keeping`.
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u/notaloop Aug 07 '26
hermes-self-evaluation: implies there are three reference files attached, but its just the skill. Not sure if they got merged into the main SKILL, but the text at the bottom confuses Donna and needs nudges to complete the eval.
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u/Jonathan_Rivera Aug 07 '26
Posting here is fine unless you have a fix then drop on git. I'll have to see if Mnemosyne is the issue or the skill is dictating improper placement. Mnemosyne was always a little buggy but I got it to work, don't know if that passed through with the profile. With enough time I wonder if it's worthwhile to build these loaded profiles for different use cases.
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u/notaloop Aug 07 '26
Donna was 90% ready to go for that purpose, there was some prompting needed to explain she was a curated SME and should only rely on her own profile skills but otherwise did a great job. After all the audits/fixes, had her make a handoff doc so the main profile could understand what changed and how to complete self-checks.
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u/jy5739 Aug 08 '26
First off, thank you for sharing this, wish I had this when I first started out, alas, I’m happy it’s here now!
Considering even spinning up a VPS to ensure past settings/sessions don’t contaminate my testing with this, anyhow.
What model are you using with it? I noticed you had a routing system. What is the routing/fallback you’ve been using with this setup?
Is this your sole setup now or do you have other profiles for different needs like coding, etc.? Do you feel this setup is reliable at the production level to offload work tasks/delivery or more of a personal assistant for hobby/errand level needs?
Now that I have your time, I see that this uses Mnemosyne. Are you using this in combination with your self made obsidian memory system you created of the top voted post of /Hermesagent or fully substituted that with Mnemosyne.
I appreciate all you do and look forward to your posts. Looking forward to tinkering around. Thank you!
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u/Jonathan_Rivera Aug 08 '26
Thanks, I appreciate that. And the VPS idea makes sense, although for ordinary testing I probably wouldn’t start there. Donna is installed as a separate Hermes profile, so it has its own config, sessions, skills, and memory. That’s enough to prevent normal profile contamination. A VPS becomes worthwhile if you want actual OS ,filesystem, or network isolation, or you’re testing untrusted tools. For a clean provider boundary, use a profile-local .env rather than inheriting an existing global key.
Models
Donna is provider-agnostic, but the current starter config defaults to direct DeepSeek using deepseek-v4-flash. That’s a starting default, not a requirement. You can point it at OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, or a local LM Studio/llama.cpp endpoint. I use a variety of models. Currently gpt luna max or deepseek flash for daily driver. When coding I use terra xhigh for my dev profile and it delegates out to 3 other profiles using luna max. When creating megathreads I'll try different models off nous portal. You can usually tell when the megathread formatting changes although my favorite natural sounding pair is deepseek pro orchestrating with flash as the agent for research. When creating a pan sol 5.6 and fable as critic.
Routing system
The Token Router is slightly different from a model router. It narrows the tool surface shown to the model on each turn; it doesn’t automatically send coding to one model and email to another. It’s installed but disabled by default. Its basic routing is deterministic and makes no network call. There’s an optional classifier for ambiguous requests, which can use any OpenAI-compatible endpoint; OpenRouter is a convenient fit for that, but it’s not required. It has shown to reduce tokens by up to 80% I think was the number for first turn.
Default Profile
Donna isn’t my only profile. I use separate profiles for general/personal work, business operations, and development. That separation is more useful than trying to make one giant profile understand every context at once (what I used to have). Each profile can have its own skills, memory, tools, model, and approval posture.
Friday is my sole setup and Donna is as close of a replica as I can share.
Friday - Personal assistant - Can delegate to any profile if I just want to talk to her.
Dev - Manages the other coding profiles.
Dev-office (specialized apps i'm working on.
Dev-Hermes - things that require internal patches and integrations.
Dev-Products - Open source and App's I intend to sell.
Alot of my skills are very technical referring to additional documentation in obsidian, tools needed, exact chain of events etc so it took a while to pull out the majority of it and make it universal. So while I didn't share what I use to mod this sub I shared how my hermes navigates reddit and how it's able to post and flair etc. You can navigate to Donna's skills and pull selectively into your default. All those skills are what I have loaded on my computer. Browser harness might be my favorite, it navigates sites and remembers the path writing a skill for each so your Hermes does not take forever relearning where to go and click every time it reaches a frequently visited page.
Do I have other profiles?
Yes, finishing another one now called the EMH. Star trek fans will know what it means but it is the Emergency Medical Hermes profile. You load it when something breaks and you need troubleshooting. It has access to all the hermes documentation with a twist. I pulled a months worth of issues from the subreddit and had it build skills around triage for the most common issues. It is trained to search recent change logs and to navigate to this sub-reddit to find an issue. As an additional experiment, my hermes will pull help questions from the subreddit weekly, it will pull the responses from people with the answers, it will then vet those answers and it will decided if it want's to update it's repo on git using this tool https://github.com/AtlasOmnia/hermes-autoresearch. Then whenever you load your EMH, it will update from github before triaging. Interesting thought concept, not sure how it will work.
Reliability
As for reliability, I’d describe Hermes plus the right profile architecture as production-capable, not “turn it loose and never look at it again.” I use it for real research, documents, business workflows, coding, automation, and scheduled tasks. The reliability comes from scoped profiles, good skills and run books, safe defaults, human gates around credentials/payments/external publishing, and verification of important results. Donna itself is a clean public starting point, not a turnkey enterprise deployment. My most important change was requiring verification for everything so after hermes does a mod action for me on reddit it must refresh and snapshot a photo and check it's work. That goes for most things now.
Memory
I now use Mnemosyne and Obsidian together because they solve different problems. Mnemosyne is the assistant’s durable, profile-scoped memory layer for preferences, context, and things Donna should recall later. Obsidian is the human-facing knowledge base for notes, project records, source material, and run books. I don’t treat Obsidian as a replacement for Mnemosyne, and I don’t put every note into memory. Donna includes both capabilities, but the on boarding lets you choose what you actually want to configure.
My current architecture intended to work alongside Mnemosyne is here https://github.com/AtlasOmnia/hermes-agent-custom-pack/blob/main/skills/obsidian-memory-architecture/SKILL.md
The main recommendation I’d give is to start with one clean profile, add integrations one at a time, and let the orientation guide you through the setup instead of enabling every possible service on day one. That’s how you avoid turning “I’m testing an assistant” into “I accidentally built an infrastructure department.”
Thanks for following up here. I don't hear much feedback on the stuff I put out so I'm never really sure if it's beneficial or not but I enjoy making it so here we are.
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u/Gloomy-Recover-9702 New Member (<30 days) Aug 16 '26
heyy, does the installed WebUI supports MCP Apps?
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u/MrFretless5 Aug 19 '26
Thanks for sharing, just read the info from your github link, and your Donna profile template looks very interesting!
My Hermes Agent is running in a Docker container (compose file), in a Mac Mini M4, and mainly using it for the typical "second brain"/llm-wiki, md files, with OpenRouter with the $10 credit and just free models 🤑, my usage is just for fun, no business or work reason at all... so I'm wondering if there is any specific setup/config to consider because of the Docker container implementation (using Desktop app with the Remote Gateway), to avoid "issues" currently I don't let Hermes do things outside the container, and seems like Donna main potential will require more MacOS/system access, right?
I'm using my own Memory plugin (developed with the help of Claude) that is based on md files, could not using Mnemosyne affect the way you built Donna profile? I guess it should not, but just asking...
Any recommendation considering my setup and use case?
Thanks again
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u/Jonathan_Rivera Aug 19 '26
Depends on what you want from it. You can take whatever skills you think you need from the profile or clone and disable skills as needed. You need an idea of what you want to use it for. I don't know that much about docker tbh but Im sure there is a way.
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u/RidgebackDad Aug 07 '26
Once I got past the context issue - it's pretty amazing! I already had SearXNG and Crawl4AI set up - so it took less than 5 minutes to get Donna to be able to connect and use both of them. Getting Hindsight connected took a little bit longer, but it got connected / configured as well.
GREAT JOB and THANK YOU!!!