# Hermes

Hermes is the self-improving AI agent from Nous Research. It runs in a terminal, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, or Signal, and keeps a persistent learning loop: it creates skills from experience, searches past conversations, and builds a model of the user across sessions.

**Host:** Dankclaw — **Hostname:** `hermes.dankclaw.local` — **Docs:** https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs

## Facts (from research, primary source)

| Item | Value |
|------|-------|
| Image | built from `NousResearch/hermes-agent` (official Dockerfile in repo) |
| License | MIT |
| Model backends | Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, or any custom endpoint |
| Interfaces | TUI, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal |
| Memory | FTS5 session search, Honcho user modeling |
| Skills | self-created, self-improving during use |

## Configuration

- Point Hermes at the local model endpoint (`http://localhost:7770/v1`) or an external provider through its provider config.
- The gateway process exposes one port for chat integration; the exact port is set in the Hermes config (`8090` convention in this repo).
- The data volume persists skills, memory, and session history.

## Volumes

| Container path | Host path (convention) |
|----------------|------------------------|
| `/data` | `/opt/hermes/data` |

## Gotchas

- Hermes is under active development; pin the image tag for reproducibility.
- Model choice drives quality; the local `frank-default-large` (Dankserver, 7770) is the intended backend.
- Do not expose the gateway without auth — put it behind [[Caddy]] with basic auth.

## See Also

- [[Dankclaw Stack]]
- [[OpenWebUI]] — the chat UI that pairs with Hermes
- Knowledge base: [[Agentic Search Best Practices]] (Hermes as the search agent)