🧭 AI Lineup
Hermes Agent
by Nous Research
An open-source personal agent that lives on your computer, remembers your work, and reaches you through Telegram, Discord, or Slack.
FreeAI AgentOpen SourceRuns Locally
The details
- What it does
- A personal AI agent that runs on your own computer, keeps a long-term memory of your projects, and reaches you through messaging apps. It can run scheduled tasks, research, and routine jobs on your behalf.
- Cost
- Free — open source. You'll need a subscription to an AI model (like Claude or ChatGPT) for it to run.
- Open Source?
- Yes — your data and skills stay on your own machine
- Ease of use
- ⚠️ Requires setup — built for confident, technical users. Very new and fast-moving.
Best for
- Persistent personal agent
- Scheduled background tasks
- Privacy-first users
- Confident tech users
Kevin’s take
“Hermes is in the same family as OpenClaw — a personal agent that runs on your own machine and messages you like a colleague. The twist is memory: it learns your projects over time and writes its own notes so it doesn't forget how it did things. Powerful stuff. Also firmly in advanced territory — a setup-required tool, not a click-and-go one.”
— Kevin, formerly of IT Support
Privacy snapshot
Generally SafePrivacy risk: Low
An open-source personal AI agent that runs on your own computer, remembers your projects over time, and reaches you through messaging apps. A close cousin of OpenClaw.
See what Hermes Agent does with your data →Related reading
From the AI Glossary
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)A shared standard that lets AI tools connect to outside services, like your calendar, your files, or a company database, in a consistent way. Before it, every connection between an AI and another tool had to be custom-built. MCP is closer to a universal adapter: build once to the standard, and many AI tools can use it. It was introduced by Anthropic and has been taken up more widely since.
- Open WeightsA model whose trained internals, the weights, have been released publicly, so anyone can download and run it themselves. Meta's Llama models are a well-known example. It's not quite the same as fully open source, because the recipe and data used to build the model aren't always shared. But open weights let people run capable AI on their own machines, without sending anything to a company's servers.
- QuantizationA technique for shrinking an AI model by storing its numbers less precisely, which makes it smaller and faster, usually with only a small loss in quality. Think of it like compressing a photo: the file gets much smaller, and most people can't see the difference. Quantization is part of how large models get squeezed onto laptops and phones.
Knowing the tool is just the start.
We teach non-tech people how to actually use AI — what to ask, how to ask it, and what to do with the answers. Tutorials, prompts, plain English. All of it.
Show Me How This Works →Start free. Cancel anytime. No judgment, ever.