# Hermes Agent by Nous Research 84 Hacker News commenters recommended Hermes Agent by Nous Research and 28 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.1 years (8 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Open-source AI agent on your own machine that connects to chat and work tools and builds its own skills. Caveat: default settings can still allow host-side execution. ## Why people recommend it - Connects chat and business tools (6 comments): "I set up a Hermes agent for our company and connected it to BigQuery, Stripe, Amplitude, etc so that our nontechnical teammates can ask and answer their own data questions via Slack. It works great!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587502)) "the combination of "your little assistant agent on it's own machine" and good messaging integration is really quite cool" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504530)) "So rather than having to go to a bunch of different websites or apps to get things done, I've linked them all to Hermes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975048)) - Automates daily tasks and personal admin (6 comments): "So rather than having to go to a bunch of different websites or apps to get things done, I've linked them all to Hermes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975048)) "It's magical. Each morning I get a small update whether the backup ran, if pods are stuck or behaving weirdly etc..." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48457429)) "Hermes basically rules my personal life at this point - it is a _very_ useful personal assistant." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417329)) - Easy setup and reliable (3 comments): "actually works well, is properly architected, and doesn’t break three times a week" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47776989)) "This agent took me less than an hour to setup and already saved me ours of sleep!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966000)) "it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785939)) - Builds its own skills (2 comments): "By providing Hermes with a system prompt, custom tools, and skills, developers get the agent loop, session management, automations, sandboxed deployment, and self-learning for free." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496328)) "The key differentiator: Hermes builds its own skills from experience and improves them autonomously." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47644401)) ## What people warn about - Poor code quality and bugs (3 comments): "Hermes Agent is AI slop "ai assistant" software that is being entirely developed by a bunch of AI agents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365750)) "It looks like a complete mess: A lot of concurrency and resource mismanagement issues and edge cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49947679)) "unresponsive, unintuitive, unsafe, vibe-coded — do not entrust it with any confidential information" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48882163)) - Unsafe default settings (3 comments): "OpenClaw and Hermes Agent both support sandboxed/containerized execution, but their documented defaults still allow host-side execution" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47910135)) "unresponsive, unintuitive, unsafe, vibe-coded — do not entrust it with any confidential information" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48882163)) "Hermes Agent (and others) default Installs are silently routing web traffic to Parallel" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586326)) - Limited practical benefit (2 comments): "I have been struggling to find any real benefit to using this for a few weeks now." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021519)) "I found it very difficult to find useful things that you can do by itself" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49023451)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [OpenClaw](https://hackerapproved.com/p/openclaw.md): 776 recommend - [Muse by Meta](https://hackerapproved.com/p/muse.md): 147 recommend - [Clawdbot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/clawdbot.md): 69 recommend - [NanoClaw](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nanoclaw.md): 58 recommend - [Manus AI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/manus.md): 41 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Hermes Agent by Nous Research", https://hackerapproved.com/p/hermes-agent/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).