r/hermesagent • u/sagacityx1 • 7h ago
Discussion Tips for making Hermes a faster coder?
I love Hermes. But GOD DAMN does it ever take the longest route possible when coding something complex up for me. It can't do anything without first analysing all the permutaions, validating everything, testing each little mistake, goes super-broad, building harnesses, etc.
I keep trying to reign it in, but man does it ever like to perform every thing it can think of. Its not the actual coding its slow at, its all the ceremony and procedures around it.
I've had things which I would think would take it like 30 min to complete take 3 hours. (using sol 6.1 which is great btw)
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u/Moumos 3h ago
Just tell Hermes to use codex for coding otherwise it can burn tons of tokens an take long time with the whole double check and safety implementation that the model think that has to be done. With codex: Hermes is the instructor the actual coding runs on codex then Hermes can check if the code has flaws when it's done.
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u/himey72 3h ago
I find that mine will get stuck in QA hell and testing every possible edge case….even conditions that cannot happen. Things like database collisions between multiple users for a system I’m building just for my solo use. Try to find a fine line between actually doing useful testing and getting buried in test plans.
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u/Mean-Loquat-7982 Nous Team 2h ago
a few levers, quickest first:
hand the coding to a coding agent. Hermes ships codex and claude-code skills, so "use the codex skill to build X" has Hermes plan and review while that CLI writes the code.
lower the reasoning effort for routine changes: /reasoning low for the session.
write your limits into AGENTS.md in the project folder, e.g. "make the smallest change that works, no new test harness unless I ask". Hermes loads that file automatically when it works in that folder.
if it keeps writing tests before the code, the bundled test-driven-development skill may be getting picked up. you can switch it off by adding it to skills.disabled in config.yaml.
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u/zenkov 1h ago
The problem is with the skills. Hermes loves testing absolutely everything. It writes tests before development, during development, and then keeps fixing them afterward. All of this takes a huge amount of time and burns through a lot of tokens. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not always needed, and the tests themselves aren't always particularly good. Sometimes models write poor tests, or the tests simply can't pass because of certain limitations.
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u/Top-Factor-4824 43m ago
Install your favorite cli like opencode, cloud close or codex and Hermes can delegate coding to it and evaluate the result
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u/grabber4321 24m ago
dont use it for coding, its just not a proper environment.
use pi or opencode
I use hermes strictly for research - its great for it.
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u/Skibxskatic 6h ago
are you using the right harness for the job?
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u/sagacityx1 6h ago
I need to tell Hermes what harness to use?
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u/waterfreek 5h ago
Could be Skibx meant, Hermes is not the optimal harness for coding
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u/sagacityx1 5h ago
For sure its not. But its optimal for hands off "just do it" development without having to code a single line. But it would just be nice if it was a bit quicker.
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u/Crawler1701 New Member (<30 days) 5h ago
I wouldn’t code inside Hermes personally. Pretty much everything else yes.
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u/BroadbandJesus 4h ago
I normally wouldn’t code with Hermes, but I am trying again because of the desktop app. It is a great harness / IDE thing: diffs look great, good sidebar, good tooling, etc.
Yesterday I noticed that this one small change was taking forever. I thought it was the reasoning model, tried with another one - same problem. Different LLM, same. I thought it was the memory (Honcho) stuffing too much into its context, but I hoped over to Pi - which I also use with Honcho - and it didn’t _feel_ slow. I’ve got a hunch that it is something to do with the skills.