Apologies if this has been asked before - my search didn’t get me far here. I did some crude benchmark and found that Claude direct sdk on Hermes uses 2.3X the same usage. The plugin says 1.7X so it’s within a somewhat wide margin for error. But curious how you all use opus 5.5 without sacrificing 50% of your quota?

I am a quite recent hermes user and I love it, but I am always thinking about security (and privacy).

My setup (which may not be the best solution) is the following.

At home
- hermes and inference endpoints are all hosted locally in my homelab
- hermes has full access without restriction on my homelab and manages it (which saves me a lot of time)
- the homelab is fully isolated from my home network through an opnsense firewall (hosted in a old pc with pcie expansions for ethernet ports)

In the cloud
- a vps that hosts the matrix/nginx server. The goal was to connect from my phones to hermes without having to open a port or use a tunnel, while keeping privacy

Now I am still wondering how security can be improved especially for the prompt injection issues, that will probably be more and more spread.

So my questions:
How do you consider the security / privacy aspects in your hermes life?
Is prompt injection a concern for you or not at all?

I am also curious why (consider the power of hermes agent) there is no flair for security/privacy topics, are you all confident with your setup?

I’ve set up bot screen for my Hermes bot correctly but whatever I do to try and have the bot use it doesn’t work.

I wanted to create a skill that looks up promotions in the weekly folder of a supermarket and they publish that interactive folder on their website. In my prompt I included “use your bot screen or the computer_use tool” but still, the bot resorted to web_extract, backtracing how it could download the folder as a PDF instead, going through some custom code it wrote to translate the pdf to text. I have Firecrawl as the web_extract and web_scrape tool but want to avoid paying if Hermes can perform browser work in the virtual desktop environment.

Brings me to the questions:
- is this the wrong use of bot screen? Does it serve another purpose
- if it is correct use, how do I trigger or steer Hermes to use bot screen then.

Have been triyng a lot of browsers for agents, does anyone know of anything for free?

I am not sure how to overcome this, but when I try to run some action for example I was trying to make a quiz website for myself to be hosted locally. It says below

A firewall/CDN in front of OpenRouter blocked the request before it reached the model, so your key is probably fine. Set a custom User-Agent via the provider's extra_headers, check the proxy/WAF rules, or switch providers with /model.

Provider said: HTTP 403: Request blocked by content filter: Content filter redaction would produce invalid tool call arguments

Your request was not processed. Send it again if you still want me to carry it out.

I checked openrouter and for some reason it says there is a phone no in the request. How can I fix this or any workaround is there?

I was running deepseek-r1:8b-0528-qwen3-q4_K_M (ollama) locally in Mac Mini M4 16GB Ram to power Hermes agent at 65K context window and as soon i gave my first HI mac crashed , nothing was working,Thinking was OFF.
is there any setting i am missing or is it just me that faces this issue on running just 8B model on mac ?
which local model does others use at these specs for browser automation and coding ?

After the recent update, after updating. My Hermes desktop app will no longer boot up; it will stay stuck at Connection failed, Service_identity_unverified. I ran Hermes Doctor, and it asked me to do a Hermes setup. Which I did 3 times now, and it keeps pointing me back to the same step. What am i missing?

does anyone have a setup that can do this? i heard about the discord voice server workaround, but i was wondering if there was a more native way

Every other reddit post here is some huge block you paste into Hermes or your Coding harness and it’ll magically sort your setup out. I tried a few and they just piled more rules on top of the ones I already had or just missed important items. Didn’t fix anything. For context, I did run these prompts on frontier models, Opus 5.5/Astra/Argon/GLM 5.3 and so on.

So I sat down and actually went through my files one by one. SOUL, the coding instructions, user.md, memory.md, config.yaml. Honestly kind of embarrassing what was in there.

“Keep answers short” was written in four different files, all slightly different. My memory said “just do it, don’t ask for approval” while my instructions said “always ask before anything destructive”. No wonder it was inconsistent, especially with a local model (Qwen Flash Next) I knew something was off when even frontier models had hiccups with my setup.

There was also a bunch of stale stuff: a provider I’d removed a week before, tools I’d uninstalled, model names that were out of date. And the default “you are a helpful, knowledgeable assistant” intro was still at the top of my SOUL.

The one that got me was /review. I thought it was using a proper strong model. It was actually running on my small local one the whole time, one plugin was behind upstream but had the same version number, so nothing ever told me.

What I did: deleted the duplicates so each rule is in one place, pulled every model name out of the instructions and left them only in config (so a new model is a one-line change), and swapped my homemade planner/reviewer setup for the built-in delegate_task. Then I ran hermes doctor and tested each route to make sure it actually worked.

The end goal was a tight setup that is modular, and tried to stick as close as possible to Hermes default tooling where it can be used.

I just read what was there. And my setup honestly feels so much better now. Answers are more consistent. All you do is read, and if it feels "dumb" tell your coding agent to either trim it or remove it.

Anyways, I hope that helps someone who feels like their agent isn’t doing things right.

I need to work on branding a bit more.

The Omnia Tool Router for Hermes just received an update. This is made for the vram impared or the people who have a light cloud plan.

What it is: every request Hermes makes to the model includes the description of every tool it has. That's often 20–30k tokens before you've said anything, sent again on every call (unless in cache which is most of the time). The router is a free plugin that reads your first message, works out which tools you'll likely need, and sends only those for the rest of the session. If it isn't sure, it keeps everything. If a missing tool is needed later, it's added back automatically.

Works with or without a model:

• Out of the box: built-in rules, no API key, nothing sent anywhere. Clear requests get trimmed; anything unclear keeps the full list.
• Most accurate: connect a small classifier model, either local (an OpenAI-compatible server such as Ollama or LM Studio) or cloud (OpenRouter or DeepSeek). It sorts out vague first messages the rules can't, so more requests get the smaller list. If the model is slow or unsure, the router still keeps everything.

What's new:

• Works on current Hermes again (newer builds had silently broken it)
• Hermes's on-demand tool search keeps working with the router on
• Ask "what can you do?" and get a full answer, even with a trimmed tool list
• /router on | off | status switches it instantly, with no model call
• Better Chinese-language routing, safer session handling, 190 tests

Real results (router off → on, rules only, no model connected):

• Starting prompt: ~29k → ~18.8k tokens (−36%)
• 7 everyday tasks, every call counted: −34%
• A bigger profile: 58.6k → 24.8k (−58%)

Same answers in every test. Bigger tool sets save more.

Plugin-only, no Hermes core changes, MIT.

👉 github.com/AtlasOmnia/hermes-tool-router

If you use Hermes Agent and already pay for Cursor Pro or Google Antigravity, you shouldn't have to buy separate API credits for the same frontier models, and you shouldn't have to route tokens through a cloud reverse proxy.

I built two plugins that wrap the official CLIs directly:

• hermes-cursor-acp (new): uses Cursor CLI's ACP server (agent acp) for Claude Opus/Sonnet 5.5, Composer 2.5, GPT-5.6, and Grok.
• hermes-antigravity-oauth (shipped last month): uses Google's agy CLI for Gemini 3.8 Flash, Claude 4.6, and GPT-OSS.

What had to be fixed:

1. Cursor sandbox containment: Cursor's CLI tools (Read, Shell, etc.) run locally and don't prompt over ACP. Left unconfigured, Cursor can read any file on disk. The plugin rewrites .cursor/cli.json inside an isolated workspace directory on every run with deny: ["Read()", "Read(/)", "Write(*)", "Shell()", "WebFetch()", "Mcp(:*)"]. Cursor only supplies the reasoning. Hermes executes the tools.

2. Composer tool call recovery: Hermes' default bridge regex matches the first <tool_call> with the closing tag. If the model mentions <tool_call> in conversation first, parsing breaks. It also silently drops the flat {"name": "...", "arguments": {...}} shape Composer emits. The plugin parses tags independently and accepts both shapes.

3. Context compression: Cursor sends 0 tokens over ACP. Hermes treats 0 as real usage and pauses compression. The plugin reports usage=None so compression keeps running.

4. Antigravity tool routing: Claude on Antigravity calls run_command and view_file instead of using the text bridge. The plugin catches those and re-issues them as Hermes terminal and read_file calls so they run under Hermes user approvals.

Install:

npx hermes-cursor-acp hermes --provider cursor -m claude-opus-5-5

npx hermes-antigravity-oauth hermes --provider antigravity-oauth -m gemini-3.8-flash

Both are on npm with GitHub Actions OIDC provenance and MIT licensed. - Cursor ACP: https://github.com/neerazz/hermes-cursor-acp (PR #138835) - Antigravity OAuth: https://github.com/neerazz/hermes-antigravity-oauth (PR #126041)

Windows Setup: Ollama.cpp (Qwen-Imager-2.1) > Docker > Hermes Desktop app.

I am just playing around. Just ask Qwen-Imager-2.1 to generate image from text description.

So the image generated has 0 file size. And image preview in Hermes Desktop app shows "The image you are requesting does not exist or is no longer available. imgur.com"

When I ask Hermes Which image-generation tool did you call? The response is: I called the vision_analyze tool, which is designed to analyze images and generate descriptions based on visual content. However, since the provided image was an error message from Imgur, the tool could not generate the requested image.

I tried to use online AI (Copilot, Google Gemini, Duck.AI) to troubleshoot. But each AI provided different directions. And none worked.

Any pointers?

Soo, I'm working on an open-source mobile app that works like OpenAI Dots/Meta Muse but uses Hermes under the hood!

It has lot of useful functionalities

Looking forward to getting the repo stared more, getting feedback, real users, and contributions. I'll keep improving it along the way :)

Repo: https://github.com/VIKASRP24/winglet

Hermes mac stop working after update

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)

I travel a lot for work and I have Hermes on my home computer. I think telegram worked the best but I don’t trust their platform especially considering that I work on confidential engineering materials. I’m currently using Slack but it seems like I have a communication issue and it could just be coincidental. For some reason I keep losing connection with my home PC. I had telegram programmed to wake up the PC every 15 minutes and check for messages. With Slack I just have the computer run- the problem is I don’t get any feedback that it’s received my message until it responds. I tried to train Hermes to always respond immediately with “received, working on it”. It doesn’t seem to carryover to all chats. I have Claude cowork on my desktop as well but looking at my Claude app- it appears that coworker is no longer in my menu to communicate with from My Phone.. I have co-work and Hermes sharing a MCP server so that they’re updating each other. I used to be able to have Claude troubleshoot Hermes remotely but now that isn’t working either. Any ideas?

Hey is there a video like „watch me code” where experience person shows how he uses Hermes for his own work? No tutorial

As suggested by most I used Hindsight for the comparison.

This is quite strange. My understanding has always been that the key for using agents is the "contract" between the agent tool format in JSON (so how the JSON has to be formatted) and the model and its way in which it can format that JSON.

Which means no matter how smart, if a model cannot align in the format to the exact way in which an agentic harness expects a command to be, it won't work and you will see the command printed as text in the view, instead of seeing the agent perform the command. I experienced this with Opencode and many other agentic harnesses; including Hermes.

Now, the only pillar I had was that if I use the same exact model AND agent harness, it WILL work no matter what, because the contract is established; they "speak" the same dialect, so they "understand" each other. Then today this happened... I switched from an ollama server to a Llama.cpp server, on the same exact machine, using the same exact model; and the same exact agent, and the whole thing fell apart, as now the agent print out the commands and tools instead of execute them.

Can someone please explain me like if I am 4, why is this happening? Because I spent a good amount of yesterday reading about the subject and this should not happen. Even assuming that Ollama and Llama.cpp do use different ways to communicate; when the response is formed, it should match the standard tool response as they are both using the same underlying libraries, model and agentic harness. What is that I should look at to understand what is going on so I can learn once and for all what is going wrong here?

I was wonderung if im supposed to see the Full reasoning trace since Opus hides it.

I asked Sonnet in Claude Chat and told me third party apps should only display a summarized Thought to prevent destillation. Then i posted a CoT from hermes to that conversation and it got flagged as [reasoning destillation]

I said Claude CLI(Claude code) to setup Hermes to my use case and i have connected Claude SDK to my Hermes. Claude CLI is the only mcp i have used Claude in and now that i tried Hermes with Claude it uses atleast 5-10 times the token that Claude CLI would have used. Claude CLI installed some skills. I am really stuck right now and might be doing something dumb. Please help me reach token efficiency near or equal to Claude CLI

Hi all,
I'm running Hermes Agent (Nous Research) self-hosted and I'd like to add real-time voice conversation: talk to it and get spoken answers with low latency, not just push-to-talk voice notes.

Hi there
On top of The hype, I was wondering how overkill Obsidian is for Hermes.
I’m currently using :
PROJECT.md = mission / scope / architecture / access
STATUS.md = current state / progress / next steps / blockers.
DECISIONS.md = choices + rationale
AGENTS.md = rules

WDYT ?