What Is Hermes Agent?

00:00 - Welcome to "The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Hermes Agent." In this video, you're going to learn how to set up your own AI agent from scratch and how to actually use it. By the end, you'll have an agent that runs 24/7 on its own machine that you can message from your phone and your desktop that knows how you like things done, that works inside the tools you already use, and that takes real work off your to-do list while you're away,

00:22 including a small team of agents that work through a task board entirely on their own. This guide is designed for complete beginners. So you don't need any technical background. And you won't write a single line of code. I'm Matt, by the way. I use Hermes every day. My own agent runs more than 20 scheduled jobs for me right now. From bookkeeping checks to trip planning. And hundreds of thousands of people have used my Hermes tutorials

00:44 on this channel to get their own agent running. The truth is that the setup is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what to do after. If you treat Hermes like a chatbot, it feels like just another chatbot. It gets interesting when you treat it like an assistant that learns. So this video is built as a ladder with six levels. And we climb it from start to finish without skipping anything. In level one, we hire your agent

01:08 and give it a home that stays on around the clock for just a few dollars a month. In level two, we reach it from anywhere with one scan of a QR code and a desktop app that feels like ChatGPT or Claude. In level three, we put it to work inside your own files and your own accounts. In level four, we train it. And you'll watch a single correction stick forever. In level five, we hand it a chore you do every week and never do it again.

01:31 In level six, we give it a team with a project board where you queue up work and your own agents run it on their own. Every level is timestamped below. So you can come back to any step later. And if you get stuck, leave a comment. I read all of them and answer as many as I can. But before we set anything up, you need to know what you're actually hiring because Hermes can use the same AI models as ChatGPT and Claude.

01:55 And the difference is everything wrapped around them. Let me show you what that means. Hermes Agent is a free open source AI agent made by a company called Nous Research. You pay only for the AI model it thinks with and for the machine it works on, which, for us, is a small rented server that costs just a few dollars a month. If you've used ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you know the basic idea.

02:18 You type in plain language. And it answers you. Hermes can use those exact same AI models underneath too. So the biggest difference is everything built around the models. If you already pay for ChatGPT or Claude, some of this will sound familiar. Both of those can run a task on a schedule now. Both of them remember you. Both of them can read your email and send a message for you. If that's all you wanted, you already have it.

02:42 But there are three things you can't buy from either of them. The first is your choice of model. ChatGPT and Claude only let you use the models their own company makes. Hermes connects to any model from any company. So you can put a cheap one on the boring jobs and a powerful one on the hard jobs, all inside the same agent. The second is ownership.

03:04 ChatGPT and Claude are services you rent with weekly limits and features the company can just take away. Hermes is a free software that runs on a server you own. So no company can throttle it or switch off something you rely on. The third is where your agent lives. ChatGPT and Claude only talk to you inside their own apps. Your Hermes Agent gets its own Telegram, WhatsApp, or a Slack account so it can message you

03:28 in the same app you already use every day. There's one more difference. In ChatGPT or Claude, you make a project for each thing you work on. And everything it knows about that work stays inside that project. Hermes turns that around. There's one agent. It learns your whole world. And you point it out whatever you're working on. Over time, it writes down what it learns as skills, which are step-by-step notes it can reuse

03:52 so it gets better at your work specifically instead of starting fresh each time. And if you've heard of OpenClaw, this is the same category of tool. An always-on personal agent. If you're coming from it, you don't have to move anything by hand. Once you're set up, just ask your agent to import your OpenClaw configuration. And it walks you through the whole thing. Now, I have one request before we start. Throughout this video, I'll use a few different examples,

04:16 all based around things I'm working on in my life. Don't copy my examples, word for word. Instead, run each prompt through your own topic. Whether that's your job, school, or something you do at home. You'll learn much faster, working on something you actually care about. Your agent needs a machine to live on. And that machine has to be three things. It has to be awake.

04:39 Your scheduled jobs, the watching, and the messages it sends you all depend on the machine being on at three in the morning. And the laptop in a bag isn't on. It has to be separate from your things. An agent runs commands, instals software, writes files, deletes files. While you're learning, you want all of that happening somewhere with nothing of yours on it. No personal photos, no passwords,

05:02 no sensitive work documents, and no browser logged into your bank. Think of it as a practise workshop. You're going to make a mess in it, which is what it's for. And if you ever break it badly, you delete the whole thing and start again in 10 minutes. And it has to be reachable. So your phone, your laptop, and your tablet are all doors into the same agent, which is what we set up in the next level. That machine is a VPS, a virtual private server.

05:28 It's a computer in a data centre that stays on all the time and that only you can log into. And the smallest one costs just a few dollars a month. You can instal Hermes on your own computer instead. But then it only works while that computer is awake. And it's running commands and deleting files right next to everything you own. So for your first agent, rent the server. Now, you can rent a server from plenty of companies.

05:51 And on almost all of them, you'd be installing Hermes yourself from a terminal, which is the text window you may have seen programmers use. That's the part I want to skip. And it's the reason we're using Hostinger. They have a one-click Hermes template that does the setup a beginner shouldn't have to touch. It instals Hermes, puts it behind a secure web address, gives you a login page, and adds backups, one-click updates, and a restart button.

06:16 It's also one of the cheapest ways to do it. Throughout this tutorial, you'll see how everything looks while I'm recording. But software like this gets updated all the time. So a button might be somewhere else. Things might have different labels. And there might even be new features by the time you watch this. If something seems different, don't panic. Follow the general idea, rather than the exact visuals. All right, let's get set up.