Hermes Agent clearly explained (and how to use it)

0:00Hermes Agent. You're seeing it everywhere. People are calling it the OpenClawKiller. And today's episode is about how you can actually install it, how you can connect it with GStack by Gary Tan, how you can connect it to Obsidian, how you can create skills. We go through step by step how you can get started with Hermes Agent. This is everything you need to know for how to run it, get started, and actually how you can even use it on an Android device. So enjoy the episode. It's with my dear friend Imran. who just explains technical concepts in such a clear way. It's a breath of fresh air. Enjoy the episode, the introduction to Ermez Agents.

0:46I begged them to come on and Imran has come on. Thank you for coming on. By the end of this episode, Imran, what are people going to get? By the end of this episode, you'll learn how to install Ermez Agent, which is the best personal agent. It has built-in memory. It learns about your workflows and helps save you time, money, and allows you to do more. And I'll even show you how to install it on an Android phone. Okay, cool. Yeah, so I've been hearing a lot about Hermes. Obviously, it's going viral. Is it the new OpenClaw? I don't know. Imran, I just need you to explain it in the simplest terms, the most clear terms, so that at the end of this episode, I can actually go on my computer, get Hermes going.

1:28so you're committing to making it as clear as possible and sharing as much sauce as possible? Exactly. Yeah, that's what I'll do. All right. All right. Let's do it. All right. So the first thing, the way that I found Hermes Agent was that I tried using OpenClaw. And when I was using OpenClaw, I ran into basically three massive issues. The first issue is that I kept having to tell it to do the same things over and over again because there was no built-in memory system, right? And this is a common problem. The second problem I found was that I had to keep restarting the gateway. I think there was a day where I had to restart the gateway once an hour.

2:04And so that was like really useless. I felt like I spent more time setting up OpenClaw than I was actually like using it to make my life better. And the third big problem with OpenClaw for me was just that it was eating up tokens and I had no visibility into how or why. So I quickly migrated over to Nebula, which is if you're looking to build, if you're looking to kind of have just like an AI coworker, Nebula is probably the better tool. But if you want to have like personalized workflows, if you want to kind of tinker under their hood and you want to have a system that learns over time, I highly suggest using Hermes.

2:38So the three things that Hermes does better than OpenClaw are basically solving the three problems that I mentioned. One is that it has a built-in memory system. So every time you complete a task and successfully complete it, it automatically writes to its own memory. This way, like over time, it gets better. It also uses a typical, like normal SQLite database, which is the same type of database as, you know, normal web applications. And what that allows it to do is search in real time for times where it's done something successfully for you. So if it didn't save it to its memory, it can actually go and search through all of the logs of all the things you've asked it to do and remember it.

3:19Even things like API keys, if you forget to save them to an environment variable, but you kind of passed it to the agent, it can actually search through and find it for you. And the last thing is it's just more stable. Like I haven't had to restart it in like over a week, which is way better than what happened with OpenClaw. So I'll walk you guys through the installation. But before I do, Greg, do you have any questions so far? Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll see by the end of this. But for me, it's like, I think a lot of us listening, we might have heard of OpenClaw, we might have installed OpenClaw.

3:56What I'm begging to know is like, what I don't want, actually I should restart. What I don't want to have happen is I install Hermes and then a week later I go back to OpenClaw basically. You know what I mean? I just kind of want to pick an ecosystem and be like, this is my personal agent. No, it makes a lot of sense. And that's kind of the problem that I was having before. I kept switching and jumping between different agents until I landed on Hermes. And I've been using it for over three weeks now, which in this space is a lot of time. So before we get into the installation, I'll walk you really quickly on my setup.

4:31So when you just type in Hermes in your terminal after it's installed, It's going to try to open up my Xcode MCP, which is not running right now, so it'll fire up in a second. Cool. Yeah, and I'll zoom out a little bit. You can see here, when you open up Hermes for the first time, on the top, you'll see the available tools. So Hermes comes built in with 40 plus built-in tools that OpenClaw doesn't have. So you don't have to go find out which tools to install. Many of the built-in tools will cover almost all of the basic tasks that you'll need to do. If you want to fire up a browser, if you want to search the web, if you want to create recurring scheduled cron jobs or like scheduled like code, it has all of that built in.

5:14Even things like image generation are built in, home assistant capabilities. You don't really have to configure or go figure out what the best tools are. The other thing you'll notice about Hermes when you first install it is that it has a lot of the really most popular available skills pre-installed as well. So like I'm on a MacBook, so it has all of like the Apple Notes, Apple Reminders. It's got Find My. It's got iMessage. I did not have to go and find this from a skills hub. It was already ready to go as soon as I installed it. So if you want to talk about simplicity of installation and having all the skills you need, Hermes is probably the best one for that.

5:52What about security? Like, are those, like, if I install some of those skills, are those, like, do I have peace of mind knowing that that's secure? Yeah, no, that's a really good question. So there's a couple ways around this. One, I think you can always ask the agent to do an audit of your security setup, which a lot of people don't think about. It's kind of almost like meta-prompting it. So Hermes has knowledge of where the keys are stored and your configuration. and you can say like, is this a secure setup? Tell me why or why not. And it'll go through and let you know if there are any secret keys exposed on your computer, if they're in plain text, if like a firewall is set up poorly, it'll let you know.

6:33The other thing that's very unique to Hermes is that it's built to also out of the box, be able to be ran inside of a Docker container in case you want it on your machine, but isolated from the rest of your files. And then you can also run it on modal as like a serverless service as well. So it's really flexible in how you make it. I personally am a little bit risky and I just kind of run it on the bare metal. And I'm just routinely making sure like every day I'm updating it. And I'm also making sure that like I ask it to, you know, secure my own setup. Cool. Let's keep going. All right. So the installation, if you're on a Mac, is pretty straightforward.

7:13You can just head over to the Hermes agent documentation. It's on the new research website. And if you're on Linux, Mac OS, or even Windows Subsystem for Linux, it's just this one line command. If it's your first time installing a tool like this on a Mac, you'll probably need to install the Xcode developer tools. So I covered that in the video that Greg found me through. But basically you would do like Xcode dash select dash dash install. You can see this command right here. And I will actually run it here. I already have it installed, you can see. And if you need to update it, you can update it later.

7:49So yeah, you can just go ahead and copy this command and paste it in and it'll run. Now, obviously I have it installed already, so it'll just go through the update. Another thing that I found was that you can actually skip the onboarding and you can just close out of it. And the most important commands that you'll need to know once you have it installed is just this one right here, which is Hermes model. So this kind of brings me into the next problem that I had with OpenClaw, which was that with OpenClaw, I just did not have enough visibility into how much I was spending on tokens. And it was like a constant battle to figure out exactly which model to use.

8:32Oh, wait, I got to run the install again. Let's try one more time. I think I broke it. Also, with OpenClaw, you can't use Anthropic anymore, right? So with Hermes, can you use an Anthropic API key seamlessly? Correct. Yeah, you can use an Anthropic API key. You also have access to the new router as well. So let me show you. All right. So this is one that's running on my gaming PC. I had this as a backup. So if we type, or let me clear this out so it's easier. Then I'll type Hermes model. and here you can see these are all the different providers that you can use to select a model. Again, this is all ready out.

9:18This is all out of the box. I did not have to go install anything. And the two biggest ways to save money on this is really just to use either the new portal or OpenRouter. So if I go on OpenRouter, you can see I'll be able to see all of the different models. And the cool thing about OpenRouter is that every once in a while, you'll have some free models available. So here, NVIDIA's NemoTron is free this week. So if you wanted to use that model and you just wanted to run it for completely free, it's available as well. You can see also through OpenRouter, I'm able to access Anthropics models here.

9:52Remember you were asking. So they're both available. And you can see a very clear layout of exactly how much it'll cost. So, you know, if I want to use Quen 3.6 +, it's probably only going to cost me 33 cents per million tokens. for input and about$1.95 per million tokens of output. And you can see the price difference between Sonnet and Quen, right? So it's almost like one-tenth the price on the input tokens, which is really good. And you sort of know in a sense, you know how much you're going to spend on tokens. You don't really know once you have it set up what your date... I mean, you'll find out basically.

10:34Yeah, yeah. based on the task you give it, how much things are going to cost. And I think that's sort of the issue I think some people are having is like they're spending, I mean, it's not crazy to spend hundreds of dollars a day on your OpenClaw instance at this point. Yeah, so actually one of the interesting ways to fix that using the Hermes agent is that you can actually, once you have a task that you know that you want to run like on a recurring basis, you can actually have it write the code one time for it. So instead of requiring an agent in the loop every single time that you need to do something, you can actually write the code to make it like more deterministic.

11:16And that'll actually long term save you tokens because you won't be spending tokens on actually like doing the processing every single time. Like instead, you'll just do it the first time, get it to write the code. And then, you know, if you're using a free model, you can use the free model to write the code and then you basically will spend no tokens on that singular skill or task forever. That's like another thing that I noticed. I realized that a lot of people are not, if you come from a software engineering world, you're always kind of thinking in this methodology of like, don't repeat yourself.

11:47So like if you are like in the habit of like building reports every single day, or you want like kind of like a daily digest, a lot of those things can be automated with just pure code instead of relying on an LLM to do like a web scrape or something like that. And that'll also save you a bunch of tokens. So, So by just switching to Hermes Agent and OpenRouter, I basically got my token spend down from like, it was like about like$130 every five days down to like maybe like 10 bucks, 10 bucks every five days. So about like a little bit over a 90 % reduction. And I'm still able to do all the things that I want to do.

12:22The other important thing that I think everyone will want to know is that, of course, Hermes Agent does allow you to have a connection to Telegram. so you can see all my agents here are named after the Muppets. So I still have a lot of room for expansion. If I need to add more agents, there's still a bunch more Muppets I can go through. And I can talk to them in Telegram just like how I can talk to them inside of the terminal. And this Cookie Monster one is super special because if you kind of take a sneak peek at the screen here, this one is actually running on a Solana Seeker Android phone that I have right here.

12:57So I wanted to talk a little bit about that because I got this set up finally yesterday. If you want to set up Hermes Agent on an Android phone, you'll see here that there's actually the same way that you install it on your computer. There is a script that you can install to put it on an Android phone. And so here I have installed it on the Android phone. And you can see what device am I on. And it says here I'm on a Seeker Android 15 phone running via Termux. That's really. Yeah. And then people are like, if some of the people who saw that I was doing this on Twitter were asking like, oh, like, why would I install it on an Android phone instead of installing it on a computer?

13:36So before I get into that, I will say that there are a few extra steps for installing it on Android. The first thing is that you need an app called Termux. Termux is basically like a terminal inside of Android. So it'll kind of look exactly like your normal Mac terminal. And then if you want to extend it even further, there's another app called the Termux API. And the Termux API app, it's available on the F-Droid, which is an open source Android app store. But the Termux API actually gives you access to the sensor data on your phone. So you can access information about the battery. You can change the Wi-Fi network.

14:17You can change the volume of the device. You can take photos using the Android phone. You can adjust the brightness. You can trigger the vibration motor. There's like all, basically everything that the Android phone has access to, you now have access to. So you can imagine a world where instead of having this running on a Mac mini, which is like sold out, you can have it running on an Android phone. That's, you know, Android phones are very cheap and you can put a SIM card inside of it. You can bring it with you. You can have it read your text messages that are sent directly to that number. You can automate basically two-factor authentication that comes in via SMS.

14:53And basically you now have a version of an always-on, low-power, dedicated agent device that isn't a Mac Mini and that isn't as expensive. A lot of people listen to this podcast, the Startup Ideas podcast, because I don't just bring on people who give practical AI tutorials, but also they like ideas, they like ways to make money using some of these new technologies and stuff like that. with the Android Hermes instance specifically, do you have any ideas that come to mind around, okay, if I were trying to make money with Hermes agent on Android, what are some things that come to mind, top of mind?

15:40Yeah, the first thing is probably because you have access to the Termux API, you can actually fire off commands on the Android phone itself. You can tap the screen. and you can like send notifications. So if I think one of the next things I want to set up is, of course, like everyone, some sort of like social media automation that uses the phone directly. So right now we have a lot of scheduler tools and people complain that social media scheduling tools, they nerf your reach because, you know, like they're going through the API instead of on the device. Well, this kind of solves that because you can actually post the content directly from the device.

16:16That's one thing that's like super cool, right? So instead of having to, you know, literally like open up your phone and download a video that's generated and post it that way, you could have this technically running on an almost infinitely scalable amount of Android phones and run accounts and post from there. And it will still show that it came from a device with like a real Mac address. That's one way. Another thing that I've seen is just, of course, like There's the make money part of it. But also, I have a lot of the very basic parts of my life that are annoying already automated. So I have an email triaging agent that every morning goes through my emails, deletes the ones that are unnecessary, unsubscribes from things that I subscribe to that are really useless, and then shows me a digest of the important emails.

17:02That might not directly make me more money right now, but it's still saving me about 30 minutes to an hour a day and just allowing me to do more. Cool. Yeah. I think the hard part is just figuring out, taking stock, auditing your personal life to be like, what are the things I need automated? And then also, from a business perspective, what are the things I need to be automated? I think that's part of the hard part. And I guess you can ask Hermes agent to audit your life and start asking you questions to help you. Ask it to help you. Yeah, we can do this. Where do I spend the bulk of my time? and let's see if it knows from my memories and if this gets too intimate we can always cut it out

17:47that's what we want and we wanted to get into it yeah so like it knows where i live knows what times that i'm in it's like okay where do i spend time what am i asking questions about that's awesome is that something that you recommend people you know use airmez agent to help help you set it up and and and productize some some of the stuff that you're doing Yeah. So I think like the idea of using agents to get things done is like a new paradigm. So the easiest way to like get used to it is to solve like personal problems in your life. So the biggest like personal problem that I first solved with an agent was like figuring out what to cook at home because my wife and I like we love door dashing.

18:27We love eating out. But obviously like that's not, you know, that's not the healthiest. And that also costs a lot of money. So the first thing I did was I set up a local speech to text model on my actual computer and I sent a long like eight minute telegram voice message of me going through my fridge and my pantry of every single thing and every single ingredient that's in my pantry. And I said every day, can you send me a recipe or three recipes based on what's in my pantry and what my fitness goals are? It seems like something small, but it kind of takes a lot of like mental load away from like my day to day.

19:00um there's a lot of things like i think that if you start doing like really basic stuff like that um you know like we can uh you can kind of automate a lot also we got we got to cut this out bro there's a lot of personal stuff in here so this is no way too much rafa let's blur it out we're gonna blur it out so okay we have to blur this out it's a lot we're blurring it up but we're keeping this in the sense that like if you do this it works exactly yeah it does work it's very intimate so definitely can't show you guys everything well it's intimate also because it knows you right and you've you put in the work with it right so if you're starting this from scratch it won't be intimate right it won't be yeah so like when you started from scratch like you'll have all the tools you'll have the skills as you talk to it every single day and you use it for work over and over again it'll like i said it'll store in its memory it'll begin to learn exactly what you do, what like and how it can help you.

19:56And you can even ask it like every night, you can ask it like, what's one or two things that you can build for me that would make my life better. And it'll do that for you. Okay, what are what are other must know things about Hermes agent? You do still have to update it every night. It's still technically beta software. So you can see, I haven't updated this one since in nine days, and I am 535 commits behind, which is quite a bit. So you do still have to update it every single day. It is still technically beta software. You still should probably constantly lock it down in certain ways. A really simple way to lock down Hermes agent, but still have access to it from anywhere is one to set up like Telegram or WhatsApp.

20:43Another thing that I highly recommend for any of these tools is that you install tail scale and you configure tail scale correctly so tail scale will allow your phone and all of your computers to be on the same kind of virtual network and then you can remotely access them using any like terminal ssh app which just lets you kind of remote in and like monitor it and chat with it that way as well before before we head out is there a question that i should have asked you about hermes agent that i didn't ask you should Should you migrate from OpenClaw? I mean, I've got my, yeah, I mean, that's the big question, right?

21:19Should you, now that we've seen it, I mean, well, we've sort of, you know, I should have, let's actually, would you be open to showing your Muppets? Yeah, let's show my Muppets. And also, like, with respect to your Muppets, like, does it make sense to set up, you know, one agent, multiple agents? How do people think about designing their agents? Do I create one that's called Social Media Manager and it's just doing social media stuff? Or how should I think about this? Yeah, so this is something that's still kind of a work in progress for me as well. So you can see Count is my main kind of agent.

22:03It's the one that's running on my gaming computer. And you can see this has all of my personal stuff set up. So I have cron jobs for like doing my Gmail triage for unsubscribing to emails to give me like expense reports, like some more personal stuff, like finance stuff is all set up here. These are technically cron jobs. They're not sub agents. I have seen people set these up as sub agents. The benefit of that is that you can assign specific models to each one. So I could have a Gmail email triage subagent that I have assigned a cheaper model to, right? Because it's more deterministic and it'll tell me like if it's like a really simple task, you can assign like a cheaper model to it and kind of save money that way.

22:45And you can add like more specific instructions. But I've also seen people just set it up as a cron job. So I have it set up as a cron job. I don't have it set up as a subagent. So I think a lot of these kind of specifics are still being figured out. We don't really know if it's better to have it as a sub agent or not. The thing that is that we can agree on is that having an agent that has memory and learns over time is incredibly powerful. And I have four set up here just because I'm like a tinkerer. But I actually think the most optimal way to do it is to have one set up or two. And the only reason why I say two is if you have one for work and one for personal stuff.

23:27I imagine if I worked at a Fortune 500 company, they wouldn't let me run Hermes Agent with all my personal stuff on it on my work computer. But I'd still want to have the capabilities of being able to automate or do work really efficiently. It feels cleaner a little bit if it's personal and work. My to-do list, for example, the way I run my life, I use Things, the to-do app, and I just have personal and work. And to me, that just makes the most sense. So the way I'm going to set this up after this call is I'm going to set up a personal one. I'm going to set up a work one. Yeah, and I think another thing that maybe we didn't cover that I think we talked about a little bit on Twitter is that this is like Obsidian.

24:13So I was never a big Obsidian fan. I kind of just stored everything in my Apple Notes and kind of hoped for the best. The cool thing about Obsidian is that even if you have multiple agents, it's all like Markdown files. So now this tool that was like, instead of having to know Markdown, you can just tell agents to like organize them. So I have this kind of setup as just like my home MD file. So it tells me all the important things I need to know about this week. It tells me about like things I need to get done today, upcoming travel, things for like my day job, things for like, you know, personal stuff.

24:46And it's all organized and set up automatically by the agent every day. and so I would not have been able to go through like the painstaking effort of like putting this together by myself every single morning but now like I have an agent that does it for me and it's just so much easier but this is like not something I would have done before like I would I wouldn't think to use Obsidian in the past but because I now have agents I can kind of manipulate it really easily it just makes it much more fun and easy to use right so you're right is your recommendation that you know once you get Hermes installed post install start you know using it with Obsidian I think Obsidian is a really clean layout because if you look at like if you look at Telegram like some of these just kind of read as like massive walls of text and even if I even if I like organize it or even if I put something in like my sole MD file to specify that it should speak concisely, like it just becomes really unruly.

25:44And it's like really hard to find like the most important information. There are people that are like experimenting with building like kind of like mission control dashboards. But I just feel like the easiest is like the one that you can see on your phone and your computer, you know? And if someone saw your Obsidian and is like, man, Amron has really like, that's, that's my dream. How do I, how do they go from, like how do they make a similar thing like how do you actually do that yeah so my obsidian was set up by my hermes agent after using my hermes agents for like 20 days so as it learned about me yeah you think you think it takes 20 days no i i think i think it takes i think it takes building up the habit of using of default going to the agent to get work done even if you can do it yourself that's the biggest thing okay so maybe it's like seven days maybe it's seven days of like using it, you know, consistently.

26:39And then after that, their Mez agent knows a good chunk about you. And then you can have it create a similar Obsidian stack. Right. Yeah. And you still right now, you still kind of have to meta prompt it. So you can ask it at the end of every day, like, what is something you should build for the work I do? Or what is one way that you can, what is like one task I'm doing over and over again that I should set up as a cron job. And it'll know, but you still kind of have to prompt it, right? So I'm hoping in the future that you don't have to do that. It just kind of knows automatically. But we'll get there.