Intermediate
Hermes Agent Fundamentals
Get a real AI agent up and running on your own machine: install Hermes, configure your model provider, give it a personality with SOUL.md, make it aware of your projects, and teach it to remember. By the end you have a fully working, personalized Hermes agent -- Hermes Agent Advanced picks up from here.
01
What Is Hermes?
Before installing anything, understand what Hermes actually is: a persistent AI agent runtime, not a chatbot. This lesson covers the core mental model and surveys real ways people are using it today.
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02
Installing Hermes and Your First Session
Install Hermes, connect a model provider, and have your first real conversation. This lesson covers every install method, the post-install setup wizard, and the diagnostic commands you will reach for when something looks wrong.
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03
The CLI and Daily Driving Hermes
Move past your first session and get comfortable with the commands, slash commands, and habits you will use every day: scripted one-shot queries, session management, multi-line input, and the tools your agent already has by default.
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04
Configuration: config.yaml, .env, and Profiles
A complete tour of where Hermes settings live, how they layer, and how to run more than one isolated agent identity on the same machine using profiles.
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05
SOUL.md and Personality
The single file that gives your agent a consistent identity and voice across every session, plus the built-in personality presets you can layer on top for a specific conversation.
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06
Context Files: AGENTS.md and Project Awareness
How Hermes discovers and loads project-specific instructions automatically, what AGENTS.md should contain, and how this differs from the global identity work you did in SOUL.md.
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07
Context References: @ Syntax for Inline Context Injection
A faster way to bring specific files, line ranges, git diffs, commit history, and web pages directly into a message, without asking the agent to go find them itself.
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08
The Memory System: MEMORY.md, USER.md, and External Memory Providers
How Hermes remembers facts about your environment and about you across sessions, the rules governing what it can write and how much it can hold, and the external memory backends available if the built-in system is not enough.
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09
Your First Week with Hermes
A single end-to-end walkthrough that ties together everything from this track -- install, identity, project awareness, inline context, and memory -- plus a troubleshooting digest for the most common early issues.
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