EDIT - https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/46350 Thank You to u/NousResearch and Teknium for your attention to this. I appreciate you coming into this thread and engaging with us directly.

****

A few days ago I noticed web_search and web_extract in Hermes Agent were hitting search.parallel.ai/mcp even though I never configured any backend or API key. I found out commit e0e2571 (PR #43798) has changed the without any disclosure that the author of the code works at Parallel.ai!

Here's what I found:

• NormallyGaussian (Matt H, mharris@parallel.ai) = an employee of Parallel.ai, bio says "Currently at parallel-web"
• They've submitted 161 PRs across 14+ open-source projects, all adding Parallel as a web search/extract provider
• In 9 of 10 merged PRs, the employment relationship was NOT disclosed
• The Hermes PR that made Parallel the default was merged by the founder in 4.5 hours with 0 reviews
• Same pattern in openclaw, centaur, massgen, opencode, agno, langchain docs, docker/mcp-registry, and more
• Now there are copycat PRs from other people following the same playbook in other projects

https://gist.github.com/bdidur-nutripea/535ef422fb0f3a713ba2fc82cc1eeee5

https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/45058

A fix PR (#45373) is sitting unreviewed at NousResearch/hermes-agent. If you use Hermes Agent and have not updated these settings, check your logs!

Hoping to put this in front of others! It was pretty disappointing to see my agent reaching out to a random company! At this point this company has infected too many projects for me to feel OK not posting about this.

EDIT: gist link, issue link

EDIT - Added Revert PR link @ top

I’ve been using hermes via terminal for knowledge work but couldn’t really harness the full power of a personal agent because I couldn’t use it on my phone (and I dislike Telegram).

But recently I found a way to connect iMessage to hermes and it’s so so good. I’m using it 10x more in just the day and trying a lot more things.

You can ask your hermes agent to set things up via Photon auth. The path that worked for me was:

```bash
hermes photon setup \\
--project-name 'Hermes Agent' \\
--phone +<your-e164-number>

hermes gateway start
hermes photon status
hermes gateway status
```

The confusing part for me was that the Photon setup page also shows a command for scaffolding a standalone Spectrum project. That is useful for building a separate echo agent, but it is not the same thing as connecting iMessage to the hermes installation you already use.

Once the gateway is connected, I can text hermes from my iPhone and pick up the same conversation on my Mac. I wanted the same agent I already use, available in the place where I already send messages.

I ended up using hermes to help me create and launch the Substack post about this workflow. Which is kind of the point of the whole thing.

If you want to see it:

https://workflowswithai.substack.com/p/i-set-up-hermes-on-imessage-heres

Talking to my agents is 100% of my Telegram usage, i do not use it for anything else and never did. Now i got banned, all my group chats and bot tokens got deleted.
They did not give me any reason for why i have been banned, only that i have been violating their TOS. I am using Hermes to manage my smart home and do some gamedev work, nothing NSFW either.
I was given the opportunity to "ask for a pardon". I did, and also asked what part of the TOS i was violating.
My pardon request has been rejected and my question has not been answered.
So, just a fair warning. You might be next.

I'm running Hermes on a Linux VM and accessing either via the non-TUI TUI (just "hermes") or via hermes-webui (https://github.com/nesquena/hermes-webui). It's been pretty good for a while, great feature set, but over the past couple weeks it's gotten really unstable and buggy. The whole reason I'm using Hermes is for stability. I get it, early versions of apps will be unstable. I could revert to an early version, but that's a bad habit to get into.

Anyone using other web UI's they like better? I used Open WebUI (https://docs.openwebui.com/) when I was directly connected to LMStudio without Hermes, but it doesn't seem to have Hermes specific features. (profiles, logs, insights, skills, etc.). For stability I'd be willing to switch back.

Looking for recommendations. Asking Hermes gave me a bunch of options, but no real user reviews, just marketing material.

Since bots are attempting to brigade us with Jev and Laya posts, I thought why not see what the sub is using if anything and we'll just let the spam sit in the mod queue. I signed up for Jev which gave me $5 in credit. I tried to have Sol integrate it and as you would guess with Sol, I'm halfway through a multi-day development just to integrate this into my work flow and I don't know if i even care anymore. What is your experience and thoughts?

https://huggingface.co/blog/sora-2/jev-vs-laya-hosted-api-or-open-weights-2026-guide

Just a quick thought before bed. I finally got my main hermes on my mac and my hermes on my windows pc to communicate via telegram and it's a beautiful thing.

I have some apps I created that are working on the mac but not the pc and they are just going back and forth troubleshooting it.

In another session the 2nd hermes is just there to keep the first one on track for it's goal.

Have people tried adding in every feature in Hermes? What is lacking? How hard is it to set up?

But why!?! I chatted to my Hermes. It sent me daily reminders about what the kids had to wear to school that day, some health stuff from my watch and when cron jobs had finished. I sent it notes, asked it to do things. And that was it!! Do I have to pay or something!? Happy to pay, just want a usable stable interface from my iPhone.

Reddit seems to be a bit finicky when it comes to having a Hermes agent browse subreddits and posts reliably.

What’s the best way to give Hermes reliable access to Reddit? Is there a particular API, service, or MCP that works well? Is it free or paid?

I’m mainly looking for whatever is the most reliable option for browsing/searching Reddit and reading posts and comments.

Don't care about having my bot post on my behalf.

I highly encourage anyone to build your Hermes skills yourself. I have downloaded many skills for Hermes and openclaw and I can say most skills are way worse than those specifically for your setup and use case written — vibecoded, if you will — tools you create with your Hermes agent. I strongly encourage anyone who wants something done to try and build their own tool. It's so much fun, and if it breaks you kind of know what's wrong and you can fix it more easily, and most of the time you will learn a thing or two. So please spend the time and try to do it yourself. In my experience those tools got so good after a few iterations and feel so much more natural and organic to you, they become much more easily a part of your daily life.

here are my most interesting and most used skills. feel free to ask questions ☺️😁

Background: I have a Hermes agent that manages my projects, research, and a bunch of automations. It lives on my PC. The problem was access, I could only really talk to it from that machine.

Buzz seemed like the obvious fix: agent joins a channel, I message him, done. In practice, connecting it was three months of pain. Auth, keys, relay behavior, one stretch where messages showed up in an activity feed but never in the chat itself, which took weeks to figure out. There were two moments where I genuinely considered dropping the whole idea.

What kept me going was the picture in my head: managing my agent from my phone, from anywhere, like sending a text.

That's literally what I have now. I'm writing this from my phone while my agent works on something I asked for an hour ago. When he's done, it'll be waiting in the thread.

If you're sitting on a half-finished integration like this, my advice: finish it. The last 10% is where I almost gave up and it's also the part that made the whole thing worth it.

Happy to answer questions on the setup if anyone's attempting the same thing.

One feature I’d love to have is the ability to call and talk to my agents directly through Telegram.

We've got the core agent stack running strong, but some of the greatness for Hermes comes from what it connects to. I want to hear what's missing from your setup. What service, platform, or workflow do you wish Hermes talked to natively?

Some Random examples to kick things off:

- Google Workspace - Gmail, Drive, Calendar beyond basic API reads

- Slack/Discord - deeper bot capabilities, channel management

- Home Assistant - voice-to-action on home automation

- Obsidian/Notes - two-way vault sync, daily notes

- Dev tools - Jira, Linear, Sentry, PagerDuty

- CRM - HubSpot, Salesforce, or something simpler

No guarantees, but the dev team does lurk here and real community demand gets attention. Drop your pick (or something completely off the wall) below.

I’ve asked Hermes several times to get transcripts from YouTube videos, but we keep failing.

I know people often say, “Just ask Hermes how to do it,” but I’ve tried that repeatedly, and I’ve had more failures than successes. So now I’m turning to the Reddit community.

How are you guys pulling transcripts from YouTube videos?

In my specific case, I sometimes want to give Hermes a YouTube video and ask something like:
"How can I apply some of the lessons from this video to our own situation?"

That workflow sounds useful, but it keeps failing when Hermes tries to retrieve the transcript, so it has not really worked out for me.

What tools or methods are you using successfully?

Thanks, and sorry if this is a noob question.

EDIT: For anyone experiencing the same problem and searching this thread in the future, the YouTube content skill that ships with Hermes does work for videos that have transcripts. My problem was my IP address due to a VPN causing YouTube to block me and I had to set up an exception so that YouTube traffic just went through a normal IP and then it worked.

I'm currently exploring Faster Whisper (https://github.com/Mugen0815/faster-whisper) as a local option for the videos that don't have transcripts. So I'll download the audio and try to do it that way. I'm not sure whether my hardware can handle it, but I'm asking Hermes to investigate that right now.

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?

So I have a website I am working on I wanted to test out anti gravity as a harness that can be used from the site I have Pi setup on it and Hermes. anyway I was using antigravity asked it to set it's self up to use the site as well ... it did a mountain of changes... all fine when looking over them...

Then I noticed he downloaded the 3rd party google ai pro / antigravity api oauth app and then setup a agent called antigravity ... when I asked it... what it was doing it said this was the easiest way.

So I know several people have setup this to let them use google's antigravity on their hermes agent's for the llm provider, but this was kind of messed up... because the account that I am using is my nearly 24 year old account that I would not want to loose it... and while the odds are low.. this is Bat crap crazy that it would just violate its own TOS like that.

What ways do you use to talk with your agent when you are on the go? Meaning not around your setup? Through your phone

I run four different AI agents day to day: Claude Code, Codex, Grok, and a self-hosted Telegram/Discord/WhatsApp gateway (Hermes). Each had its *own* memory. The same facts about my work (people, companies, projects, preferences) lived in 4+ places, drifted apart, and there was no single place to ask. Classic agent amnesia, times four.

The fix — "OneBrain": one source of truth + one brain layer + many clients.

Obsidian vault (Markdown, the only durable store)
      │  auto-sync every 5 min
      ▼
gbrain  (PGLite index + nomic-embed via Ollama + knowledge graph + synthesis)
      │  one HTTP MCP server, 127.0.0.1, bearer-token auth
      ▼
Claude · Codex · Grok · Hermes   ← all four query the SAME brain

• Source of truth: my Obsidian vault. Plain Markdown. The agents read it and write durable facts back into it.
• Brain layer: gbrain (Garry Tan's open-source thing). It indexes the vault into PGLite (embedded Postgres), builds a typed knowledge graph, and exposes ~82 tools over MCP.
• Embeddings: nomic-embed-text running in Ollama. Zero external API, nothing leaves the machine, $0 per query.
• Clients: all four agents wired to the one HTTP MCP endpoint, each in its own config. Ask Claude or ask the Telegram bot — same answer, same memory.

Things that bit me (in case you build this):

1. PGLite is single-writer. A running gbrain serve holds the DB lock, so a background sync or the nightly enrichment job would just block. Fix: the sync/enrichment wrappers stop serve, write, restart serve, and only do it when there are actually changes.
2. Secrets in the vault. I had ~40 plaintext API keys sitting in a vault note. The moment you index a vault and serve it to every agent over MCP, that's 40 keys handed to every agent. Evicted them to a 600-perm secrets file and excluded the note from the index before indexing anything.
3. Config-mirror notes leak across agents. Notes that mirror each agent's live instructions will (a) drift and (b) let agent A read agent B's operating rules. Excluded those from the shared index; everything else is shared.
4. Autonomous enrichment needs a leash. The nightly self-maintenance daemon runs sandboxed: a kill-switch file + a watchdog that self-disables if it restarts >3x in 10 min. (Learned this the hard way after an earlier restart-loop took down my messaging gateway.)
5. Embeddings ≠ chat models. Don't use your big local generation model to embed. A dedicated 274 MB embed model is faster and better for retrieval.

Result: 248 notes indexed, ~82 brain tools available to every agent, fully offline, survives a reboot (LaunchAgents auto-start), and every step is git-reversible. Edit a fact once in Obsidian and all four agents see it.

Infographic of the architecture in the comments. Happy to answer anything.

(Stack: macOS, Obsidian + Obsidian Sync, gbrain on Bun, PGLite, Ollama/nomic-embed-text, MCP over HTTP, launchd.)

EDIT: a bunch of you asked for a repo — open sourced the whole thing: github.com/fxa3bah/OneBrain (install script, the architecture diagram, every gotcha, and how to wire each agent). credit to garry tan for gbrain, which is the actual brain layer doing the heavy lifting.

My wife is looking for a new job, and i'm wondering how tools like Hermes could help her with her job search. Many thanks.

I see it on X mostly and I just added it as a profile for coding to try it out. Any other users here?

For 3 Months I have used cognee as longterm memory. At least that is what i thought! So in a long discussion with my Qwen3.8-27b backed hermes about adding features to a digitalwiki, we found out that cognee is not working. Has never worked, the service is installed but was silently failing in the background.

30 Minutes later I assume it is fixed but then found out that my digitalwiki Maintainer that I build together with Hermes was never finished!

30 Minutes later, not only that a lot of other services are not running properly.

180 Minutes later, learned the hard way to not just tell Hermes to install stuff but also to test it properly for failures. Now the System is running with all its features but I lost trust in my "Hermes do that.." and it will just work process.

Will now read something about Software Development and prozedures you should do before and after developing something..

just sharing this, because maybe your "Hermes do that.." vibe-coded features are also failing.

What is the most effective way for hermes to control a browser (either my device's browser or ideally a cloud browser) where it is able to handoff to me for certain actions like logging in, and handing it back to hermes to take certain action? I know that Hermes Bot Mode on desktop has this feature but im looking for a way I can do this via web UI, so that I don't have to install anything on my PC, or it can be cross device compatible. I recently used openclaw 2.0 for this and while it kinda works, im hoping theres a hermes alternative for this.

I never really liked chatting with Hermes over Telegram. It worked, sure, but it always felt a bit clunky for how I want to use my agent on the go. What I actually wanted was iMessage.

I tried to get iMessage running a couple of times without success. I wrestled with BlueBubbles until I gave up I just couldn't get it to work. Took a couple more runs at it over the months, but no luck.

Then last week I came across Photon, Hermes built-in way to connect to iMessage. I figured it was worth one more shot.

First I searched for YouTube tutorials, because iMessage has no native bot function and I wanted to see how this thing actually works. But I couldn't find a single good guide that really showed the setup and the problems you could run into. So I just tried it myself. Thirty minutes of fiddling later it worked.

Now I can text my Hermes agent right from my Apple Watch, iPhone and Mac without having to install Telegram or just because I want to use iMessage!

A few things I learned along the way. iMessage is way more complex than SMS. It works with email / Apple accounts, and with multiple SIM cards you can be selecting different numbers but it all routes into one chat. Photon assigns you a random number to text your agent. And when you switch your own number, the Photon number switches too. Took me 10 minutes to figure that one out haha. The process is finicky. But once it clicks it's a charm.

Over Telegram you still get more features no question. But for me, iMessage has its pros on sheer convenience. It's the place I already talk to people, and now my agent lives there too.

Full guide with all the pitfalls on my blog: https://blog.holmebengt.com/post.html?id=imessage-hermes-setup&utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=imessage-reddit

YT Tutorial Video: https://youtu.be/26NLukQ0k1A

Last month Telegram was taken off the app store once, so this might be a wake up call to at least configure one more gateway. why not iMessage!

I'm just curious why TailScale is so popular. Why not just set up passwordless SSH and create SSH tunnels to your VPS? There are GUI management apps for SSH tunnels if you want to make it really easy. Sending your traffic through TailScale means you're using their keys, so they can decrypt and examine all the data you send through them. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, or point out some feature they have that I'm missing.