Hermes Agent by Nous Research
Hacker ApprovedRanked 3 of 26 AI agents by recommenders
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.
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.
112 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 84
- criticize it
- 28
- approval share
- 75%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 1 month
Median of the 8 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it carries the badge
- 84 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Connects chat and business tools
“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!”
Comment from 18 Jun 2026 in “Migrate from OpenClaw” “the combination of "your little assistant agent on it's own machine" and good messaging integration is really quite cool”
Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “NanoClaw Adopts OneCLI Agent Vault” “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”
Comment from 1 May 2026 in “Apple Says Mac Studio and Mac Mini Will Be in Short Supply for Months” - Comment from 8 Aug 2026 in “DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731”
- Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “Unsloth GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally”
- Comment from 4 May 2026 in “GitHub Is Down”
Automates daily tasks and personal admin
“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”
Comment from 1 May 2026 in “Apple Says Mac Studio and Mac Mini Will Be in Short Supply for Months” “It's magical. Each morning I get a small update whether the backup ran, if pods are stuck or behaving weirdly etc...”
Comment from 9 Jun 2026 in “Hermes Agent – Open-Source AI Agent with Persistent Memory” “Hermes basically rules my personal life at this point - it is a _very_ useful personal assistant.”
Comment from 5 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)” - Comment from 21 Oct 2026 in “Claude Duet”
- Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “Grok Bot”
- Comment from 30 Apr 2026 in “AI On-Call Engineer That Fixes Prod While I Sleep”
Easy setup and reliable
“actually works well, is properly architected, and doesn’t break three times a week”
Comment from 15 Apr 2026 in “Claude Code Routines” “This agent took me less than an hour to setup and already saved me ours of sleep!”
Comment from 30 Apr 2026 in “AI On-Call Engineer That Fixes Prod While I Sleep” “it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it”
Comment from 15 Apr 2026 in “Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?” Builds its own skills
“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.”
Comment from 11 Jun 2026 in “Building Agents Without Harness-Engineering” “The key differentiator: Hermes builds its own skills from experience and improves them autonomously.”
Comment from 4 Apr 2026 in “Hermes Agent: The self-improving open source AI agent Complete Guide for 2026”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Poor code quality and bugs
“Hermes Agent is AI slop "ai assistant" software that is being entirely developed by a bunch of AI agents.”
Comment from 19 Aug 2026 in “OpenRouter Is Joining Stripe” “It looks like a complete mess: A lot of concurrency and resource mismanagement issues and edge cases”
Comment from 3 Oct 2026 in “Pop!_OS bans AI-generated code from much of its codebase” “unresponsive, unintuitive, unsafe, vibe-coded — do not entrust it with any confidential information”
Comment from 12 Jul 2026 in “I advise against using Hermes Agent” Unsafe default settings
“OpenClaw and Hermes Agent both support sandboxed/containerized execution, but their documented defaults still allow host-side execution”
Comment from 26 Apr 2026 in “Octopal: Powerful AI agents without blind trust” “unresponsive, unintuitive, unsafe, vibe-coded — do not entrust it with any confidential information”
Comment from 12 Jul 2026 in “I advise against using Hermes Agent” “Hermes Agent (and others) default Installs are silently routing web traffic to Parallel”
Comment from 18 Jun 2026 in “Migrate from OpenClaw” Limited practical benefit
“I have been struggling to find any real benefit to using this for a few weeks now.”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “Realising that Hermes is useless bloat” “I found it very difficult to find useful things that you can do by itself”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “Understanding the AI Economy”
Other AI agents people recommend
The four most recommended other AI agents, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenClaw | 776 | 975 | 44% | 10 | 1 mo49 owners | — |
| Muse by Meta | 147 | 232 | 39% | 6 | 1 mo4 owners | — |
| Hermes Agent by Nous ResearchThis page | 84 | 28 | 75% | 9 | 1 mo8 owners | Approved |
| Clawdbot | 69 | 99 | 41% | 3 | 1 mo7 owners | — |
| NanoClaw | 58 | 45 | 56% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 129 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“In exactly one prompt to my Hermes agent, it developed and deployed a HackerTube Android TV app”
“She's hilarious. She does our meal planning and grocery shopping at Walmart via BrowserMCP.”
“I can set the rules for the output and most of all executive function goes from intent to execution”
“there is a world of things you can do with them without giving them access to your email or bank account”
“It looks like a complete mess: A lot of concurrency and resource mismanagement issues and edge cases”
“I have it under the same harness (Hermes Agent) so result is more or less the same and it costed me nothing”
“Hermes Agent is AI slop "ai assistant" software that is being entirely developed by a bunch of AI agents.”
“A residential IP was enough for me to get my Hermes agent grocery shopping successfully”
“We've just spun up our first Hermes agent, with direct API access to our main inventory system”
“I found it very difficult to find useful things that you can do by itself”
“I have been struggling to find any real benefit to using this for a few weeks now.”
“unresponsive, unintuitive, unsafe, vibe-coded — do not entrust it with any confidential information”
“The future is you having an OpenClaw/Hermes agent connected to these native MCPs”
“can chat with the Nous Hermes agent over Telegram about pending orders”
“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!”
“there were lots of useless garbage skills enabled, over 10k of context used just to list them all”
“Hermes Agent (and others) default Installs are silently routing web traffic to Parallel”
“it is like having your own little DevOps waking up at night, fixing the infra when needed”
“Even the Nous Research guys have stated that "Qwen3.6-27B is the canonical local model to use Hermes Agent with"”
“I'm managing a Hermes agent that can spin up a whole fleet of purpose-tuned agents”
“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.”
“It's magical. Each morning I get a small update whether the backup ran, if pods are stuck or behaving weirdly etc...”
“Hermes accomodates other coding agents pretty well and has in fact bundled skills for claude code and codex”
“Hermes basically rules my personal life at this point - it is a _very_ useful personal assistant.”
“It upgraded everything that needed to be upgraded, patched what needed to be patched”
“With a hermes-agent for a sysadmin I can debug problems from my phone”
“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”
“This agent took me less than an hour to setup and already saved me ours of sleep!”
“OpenClaw and Hermes Agent both support sandboxed/containerized execution, but their documented defaults still allow host-side execution”
“I've liked Hermes agent, but never used Claude code so don't know how it compares”
“Browser Use is ready, CDP is still beta. Explicit success criteria fixes most of the self-grading issues.”
“they even have a Nix flake in the repo. That pretty much sells it right there.”
“I find OpenClaw and (more so) Hermes Agent useful for software development, research, and writing”
“it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it”
“actually works well, is properly architected, and doesn’t break three times a week”
“look into Hermes agent and you can start understanding the internals of how all this stuff is done”
“The key differentiator: Hermes builds its own skills from experience and improves them autonomously.”
“hermes ( https://github.com/nousresearch/hermes-agent ) and accompanying trace datasets”
“the combination of "your little assistant agent on it's own machine" and good messaging integration is really quite cool”
“powering hermes agent at 35 to 50 tok/s with 99 percent tool call success rate”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.