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Hermes
A highly customizable, developer-oriented AI harness with 100+ community tools and self-improving skills.
github.com/nichochar/hermesHermes is built for developers who want maximum control over their AI assistant. With a plugin architecture supporting 100+ community-contributed tools, it's the most customizable assistant platform available.
The standout feature is its self-improving skills. The agent learns from interactions and improves over time. Hermes requires local setup and is a DIY platform where you manage your own hosting, memory stack, and API costs.
Overview
| License | MIT |
| Pricing | Free + API costsDIY hosting costs |
| Ease of setup | ModerateRequires local setup and configuration |
| Cloud hosting | NoSelf-hosted only |
| Self-hosted | YesLocal installation |
| Multi-model | Multiple providersConfigurable |
Strengths & Weaknesses
| Strengths | |
| Most customizable assistant platform | |
| 100+ community tools and plugins | |
| Best self-improving skills. Learns from interactions | |
| CLI and TUI interfaces for developers | |
| Fully open source under MIT | |
| Multi-model support | |
| Weaknesses | |
| Extended-thinking Claude models crash-loop the gateway with non-retryable 400s. Reordered thinking blocks invalidate signatures, no self-recovery | |
| All LLM providers return empty 400 on Windows. Complete platform breakage reported on v0.15.1 | |
| Memory plugin has five compounding silent failures. Auth errors, timeouts, and missing data all render as "No relevant context found" (86 failed writes went unnoticed for 9 days) | |
| Documentation and code drift badly. 27 inconsistencies found in a single audit (wrong CLI commands, nonexistent env vars, broken provider IDs) | |
| Agent session HOME points to hermes profile directory instead of user home. Breaks git, SSH, npm, Azure CLI | |
| Gemini vision format errors misclassified as payment errors, marking the provider unhealthy for 10 minutes | |
| No web, iOS, or voice support | |
Links
Capabilities
| Memory & Intelligence | |
| Persistent memory | DIY memory stackConfigurable but requires manual setup |
| Self-improving skills | YesLearns from interactions and improves over time |
| Cross-session context | Manual export |
| Security | |
| Credential management | DIYUser manages all secrets |
| Permission system | No permissions |
| Network isolation | None |
| Integrations | |
| OAuth connections | No managed connectors |
| MCP support | Yes |
| Plugin ecosystem | 100+ community tools |
| Automation | |
| Scheduled tasks | Yes |
| Heartbeat monitoring | Yes |
Channels & Platforms
| iOS | No | |
| macOS | No | |
| Windows | No | |
| Web | No | |
| CLI | Yes | CLI & TUI |
| Voice | No | |
No | ||
| Telegram | No | |
| Slack | No |
