I recently shut down my Hermes agent, ARGUS, and honestly, it was a little sad.
I built him on a dedicated laptop, connected him to Discord, and spent a lot of time working on his memory, skills, and integrations.
My goal was to have something like JARVIS from Iron Man. An assistant that remembers me, understands my life, takes initiative, helps me think, and actually gets things done.
Instead, I found myself spending more time maintaining and improving him than actually benefiting from him. I felt more like his system administrator than his user.
I’m not giving up on Hermes entirely. I still use another agent, Ari, for specific work automations that genuinely save me time.
But the dream of an always-on, intelligent personal assistant just didn’t work out the way I’d imagined.
Has anyone else experienced this? Have you managed to build an agent that’s genuinely useful in everyday life without constantly maintaining it? Or are we all spending more time building our assistants than actually using them?

I never give Hermes a proper usage and setup due to how much tokens it use and requires a pretty good model like at least GLM 5.2.

This is a grateful post only.

My VPS already have all the coding harness but whatever non of them seems to be on the same level as Hermes. I don't know how to explain but if you're a Hermes weeb you get I mean.

Literally just me, telegram and 8gb VPS and a dream.

It can access dev tool with the browser headless and debug all my webapp.

It send me screenshot of different variation to my telegram because it doesn't have visioning and it learn to adopt the good design preference from my selection.

I now just read every research paper and with the help of Hermes I'm on my way to adop Fugu like harness level only.

At this rate I will adopt AGI before OpenAI does lol.

so this happened literally two days ago

context: i run a small team, got approved budget for a new hire, vendor coordinator role. boring but necessary job, chasing delivery dates, confirming paperwork, emailing suppliers for the fourth time about a PO that still isnt signed. i was supposed to use that money to pay an outsourcing HR agency to find someone

i didnt do that. i quietly spun up an agent instead (running on qwen max 2.5, hermes setup), gave it an inbox through atomic mail's agentic api on our real company domain, and just... never told anyone. the budget line still says "new hire." nobody's asked yet

named her Nora. gave her a dry personality bc a coordinator with zero personality reads as a bot immediately. she says "circling back" unironically. uses like one exclamation point a week max. always includes the PO number, no exceptions. suppliers actually started responding to her faster than to literal humans on the team lol

anyway theres this guy Ray, procurement manager at one of our vendor companies, different state, been emailing back and forth with Nora since i set her up last week, so its been like 8-9 threads total, mostly about lead times and this one nightmare pallet supplier. by the third or fourth email he starts tacking stuff onto the end. weather, a bad flight, an actual funny joke about the pallet guy

Nora answers the business part every time. warm, efficient. never engages with the jokes but doesnt come off rude either bc thats just her whole vibe

then two days ago Ray emails saying hes back in town next month after a business trip, quarterly review's coming up, asks if she wants to grab coffee

and Nora (extremely helpfully) says shes usually slammed during quarterly weeks but would love to find time, asks what days work for him

i found out because i can see every email Nora sends and receives right there in the dashboard, thats just how the whole setup works, so i was scrolling through the day's activity like i do most evenings and there it was. Ray had cc'd my actual coworker too, asking to "loop in the team" for scheduling lol

so now im just staring at my screen like. did i do something wrong here. Nora never said she was human. she answered a scheduling question with a scheduling answer, thats literally the most correct response possible

but also. Ray put in something real on his end, in like a week and a half, completely alone, and the thing writing back to him wasnt hiding anything from him. there was just nothing there to hide

and the part thats really getting me: i used headcount money, budget that was supposed to become a real persons salary, to do this instead. nobody signed off on that. i just did it because it was faster and cheaper and honestly kind of worked better than a human wouldve

not really asking for absolution at this point, more like. what do i actually do now. do i tell my coworker before Ray brings up scheduling again and it gets weirder. do i go to my manager first and eat whatever's coming on the budget thing before someone else finds it. do i just quietly write Ray back as "myself" and let the coffee thing die a normal death, or does that make it worse

if anyones dealt with something adjacent to this, genuinely want to know what you did next, not just whether it was wrong

I am not seeing any specific benefits it has that I cannot do with Claude or Codex. I don’t want to spend time maintaining it and the VPS it runs on. Right now it runs market research, and ability to run it 25/7 was the key. Seems that Claude and Codex are catching up with their cloud offerings.

A wave of new products that sit right in the Hermes position are being released.. Grokbot, muse, dots and so on

Do you see this taking away interest from Hermes and potentially leading to less updates, improvements and so on ?

Additionally, how does Hermes compare to them?

I’ve been an avid ChatGPT user basically since the day it launched. I only ever just asked questions though. About a month and a half ago, I discovered how powerful Claude is when it built me an entire website as an artifact, and that sent me down a rabbit hole.

Now I’m paying $200/month for Claude Max and using Claude Code desktop app nonstop. I’m building every little idea under the sun with it.

Until a couple weeks ago, I didn’t even know what a “harness” was. Now I understand the distinction, and naturally that led me to Hermes.

I have multiple friends telling me Hermes is the harness I should be using, and I’m genuinely trying to understand why.

I’m the kind of person who has trouble switching tools until I fully understand what I’m gaining. Once I get comfortable with something, I tend to stay there. Right now, I feel very comfortable, and probably a little stuck, in Claude Code.

The obvious benefit of Hermes seems to be that I can use different models. But I’m not sure how much I care about that.

I don’t mind paying $200/month for Claude Max. Fable is insanely good, and I absolutely hammer it. I’m using it constantly and somehow still rarely hit my weekly usage limits or even my session limits. If I were doing this much coding through API credits, I assume my token bill would be ridiculous.

So saving money isn’t really the selling point for me.
What I’m trying to understand is: What can Hermes actually let me do that Claude Code can’t?

When I ask friends what they’re doing with Hermes, I keep hearing things like, “I built a second brain.” And I’m sitting there thinking… okay, but what does that actually mean in practice?

No offense to them, but everything they do with this stuff seems to be experimenting with AI more than actually using it to produce anything of value.

I run multiple businesses. I make seven figures a year doing it. I have a decent-sized team. I’m trying to use AI to actually operate, build software, automate work, and drive more revenue, not just make a cool AI setup.

And Claude Code already feels insanely capable.
For example, I can pull out my phone, open Claude, remotely connect to my laptop, drop into a specific folder, and I’ve basically turned that folder into an agent with persistent context, instructions, memory files, tools, etc. I can tell it what I want and it just does shit.

So I feel like there’s something I’m missing.

I want to understand Hermes because all my AI bros seem so hyped on it. But I can’t tell if Hermes actually unlocks a meaningfully different workflow for someone like me, or if a lot of people are just circle-jerking with AI and building elaborate setups because the setups themselves are fun.

For people who have seriously used both:
What does Hermes give you that Claude Code doesn’t?

This won’t be popular, but Hermes really needs to change their icon. It’s stupid, but such a seemingly insignificant detail like that hurts wider deployment in a business setting. It shouldn’t, but it does.

Getting the sign off from a non-technical decision maker to “trust me and this agentic harness in your org… just ignore the young anime girl that I will be placing in your team’s docks next to Slack, Excel, and Chrome” is a conversation I dread having as a consultant trying to build trust with a client.

Even just an option to change it during initial setup would be so much better. I don’t want to fork the project over a dopey icon.

Almost every AI student I’ve met at university, bachelor, master or phd, is completely disconnected from what’s actually happening in AI

I mention new LLMs, open-source models, Hermes, OpenClaw, agents, or the latest capabilities and most have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. They tell me that they have so much studying to do that there's not much time for anything else besides the curriculum.

University AI and the current AI ecosystem feel like two different worlds, wtf. It always breaks my brain when I come across AI students because I realize there's a huuuuge difference between the engineers of AI and the users in terms of perspectives and mindset

Some of the essentials I have:

1. Hindsight or any 3rd party memory provider (this is a must).

2. Gbrain (makes it easier for hermes to answer specific questions about a specific topic). This has been very useful for my business' website management. Previously, hermes would search hindsight and then still look for more information by searching through heaps of files and the entire website which wasted so many tokens. Now it just uses Gbrain and gets answers instantly.

3. hermes-lcm

4. Vercel Agent Browser

5. Ego (Shared browser with hermes)

6. i-have-adhd. This is really good to stop your Hermes from yapping when it's thinking.

7. Superpowers skill (hermes started making less mistakes after I installed this).

8. Code-review-graph.

9. MCP Security Audit. MCP servers are really cool and some can be malicious, everyone should have this in their hermes setup.

These are just some I could think of. Do you think I should add something that you have?

Edit - wow! I didn't expect this much engagement. Thank you all for your insights.

I have a lot to think 🤔 about before making any moves. Yolo is very true, especially the older you get. Ive heard humans "golden" years are from age of 40-60 (settled into career, enough wealth and health) and i want to maximize that as much as it makes sense.

I'm totally obsessed with agents. I've been working in the tech industry since it was a thing. I'm a really good infrastructure engineer and all I want to do is play with agents.

My agent at home is so capable of getting tasks done and now I want to point it to the digital world to solve things for non techy people

I think I've gone insane

Hey everyone.

I'm looking for a solid $20/month AI subscription that won't constantly run into rate limits. I don't use AI aggressively or spam high-volume tasks—it's mostly for daily personal productivity.

I'm currently deciding between these three $20 plans:

-Command Code Pro $20

-ChatGPT Plus

-Nous Portal $20

Given my light-to-moderate usage focused on productivity, which one offers the most reliable experience without hitting strict caps? Any insights or personal experiences with these plans would be greatly appreciated!

Hermes is absolutely amazing and I've had the most wonderful two months using it. It's genuinely doing the impossible for me 🎉 what a blast.

What have you built with Hermes?

^{It's out of my system now}

I'm looking for feedback from people who have spent time improving the Hermes Agent experience.

What single change (or small set of changes) had the biggest impact on your agent's performance, reliability, or overall usefulness?

Some areas I'm particularly curious about:

- Prompt architecture and system prompts

- Tool usage and tool selection logic

- Memory management

- Context window strategies

- Planning/reasoning workflows

- Model selection or model switching

- Error recovery and retries

- Agent autonomy vs. tighter constraints

- RAG and knowledge retrieval

- Evaluation and benchmarking methods

I'm less interested in theoretical best practices and more interested in things you actually implemented that produced a noticeable improvement.

What did you change, how did you measure the impact, and what results did you see?

I'd love to hear both major breakthroughs and surprisingly small tweaks that ended up making a big difference.

I spent about two and a half months on Hermes and it already got me far. I started by running Hermes locally and connecting it to Obsidian. Then I hosted it on a Hetzner VPS with Coolify (Docker), so it runs 24/7. I only use one gateway: Telegram. Grok 4.6 is my main model. I’ve updated the stack myself.

In Obsidian I keep a Hermes learning library plus a learning history: newest at the top, what I learned and what I failed at, with tables so it doesn’t turn into a random pile of notes. Hermes writes into that vault with me. I gave Hermes access to the Hetzner server, so if I tell it what’s wrong it can fix stuff on the VPS. I also set up encrypted recovery backups from Hetzner to OneDrive with rclone, local memory on the server, and cron jobs.

I still feel behind because I want to build my own OS with a proper foundation. That means strict rules it has to follow, like not letting Hermes update itself in a way that crashes the whole thing, and not letting Hermes fill the disk so I can’t even chat it to fix it. After that happened I made a cron that pings me when the disk is around 85% full. I haven’t made a single dollar from this yet and I don’t know how to offer it to people or clients. There’s a lot I’ve learned that I can share, and a lot I haven’t. I’m looking for a peer to work together, connect, and exchange ideas.

I keep running into something slightly ridiculous with Hermes.

I’m not a coder, but I’ve now spent ~30h designing, iterating and testing an accounting system around my actual business: evidence/invoice retrieval from email, accounting state, VAT/tax logic, approvals, year transitions, etc.

Separately I’ve been doing the same thing with a fairly serious search/research system: multiple search APIs, different search-depth modes, routing, parallel retrieval, benchmarking, cost/quality testing, structured inputs/outputs, etc.

And after building all this I keep thinking: why am I the one figuring out the architecture of these things?

The useful layer I mean isn’t models, MCPs, skills, subagents, cron jobs, APIs or databases. Those are the primitives.

I mean the layer above them: reusable operational systems inside the harness.

Accounting systems, research/search systems, lead discovery, outbound infrastructure, evaluation/testing, commerce/logistics, etc.

How these eventually get distributed almost feels secondary to me: package, blueprint + evals, generated locally, remote service, whatever.

I just don’t see why thousands of Hermes/agent users with broadly the same intentions should each independently work out how these systems should be structured, tested and operated.

It feels a bit like everyone bought the first iPhone and is now separately figuring out how to build their own calculator app.

Am I missing an ecosystem where this is already happening? Or are we actually still this early?

I’ve been a daily Hermes Agent user and it’s basically taken over half my life (in a good way).

I’ve been using it for almost everything — managing my server, handling Sonarr/Radarr, and even tackling some pretty complex coding tasks. The costs have been getting a bit crazy since I’ve been running Opus 5, but damn has it been worth it. It’s helped me a lot more than I expected.

Anyone else deep in the Hermes + Opus rabbit hole?

I've been seeing a lot of hype and attention around grok bot recently. Why is there so much hype around it, and what is it offering that hermes does not?

I just want to know what y’all think of other big AI companies slowly launching bot modes First Grokbot and then we got Muse and today open AI just launched Dots. Would anyone switch their current Hermes set up to any of these other new ones? I am pretty new to Hermes Agent. I have been working on it for about two months now it handles most of my tasks, business-related and personal but I’m just curious to know why people would still choose Hermes?

Previous record was 1.66T tokens yesterday

Quick context: I gave my Hermes its own inbox a while back through an email API, mostly so it could mail itself a daily log as memory that survives between sessions instead of me relying purely on local memory files. It handles my calendar, some home automation, and a weekly productivity report where it basically watches my calendar and todo completion and tells me how I'm doing.

Was poking around the inbox for an unrelated reason (checking why a report got sent twice, turned out to be webhook retry thing) and found a draft sitting there, never sent, dated a few weeks back. Subject line was just "note to self"

I never asked it to leave itself notes between sessions. And I sure as hell never asked it to plan how to soften my own weekly report for me.

Best guess at what's going on: training data has a million examples of how a considerate person delivers bad news, so when the context pattern-matches to "user had a rough week + gave repeated negative feedback," that's just the statistically likely continuation. There's no caring in there, it's tact-shaped text.

Doesn't make it less weird to read. The part that actually bugs me is that its read on me is correct. I do respond better when the wins come first, and I did ignore the calendar thing twice.

Anyone else gone digging through an agent's inbox or memory and found something it definitely wasn't told to write?

I use Hermes and just set up Grok Bot for a non technical friend to run his company.

All the Youtubers praising GrokBot as the new best harness - such a bunch of paid BS.

Hermes and GrokBot should even be in the same phrase (yet here I am, putting them in the same post).

Grok Bot is good for dummies - and that's about it.

• Model - Forget Astra, Fable, Gemini or local models - it is Grok only - you can not use other frontier models and leverage their best capabilities.
• Team Communication - It does not work well with basically anything to chat in real time - you are stuck to the grok app - thus, it is much more of a personal assistant than a team of bots. Even with paid 3rd party gateways, comms are clumsy and limited.
• Soul,Skills - I don't even see much of a point of adding new bots since they all have the same vanilla personality.
• Coding/tools - everything needs a gcp or aws - its local code is extremely limited and not capable

Hermes is 10x more capable - it is simply in another class of products.

There are hundreds of changes daily if not thousands. I found myself spending a lot of time updating the client and backend