What is the Hermes agent? A self-improving assistant from Nous Research

Hermes is an open-source AI agent built by Nous Research, and its pitch is a learning loop: it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist what it learns, searches its own past conversations and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions. It is MIT-licensed, it is under active development, and it is one of the two engines Diali hosts.

What it does

It lives where you do. Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal and a terminal all run from a single gateway process, with voice memos transcribed and conversations continuing across platforms. It has a built-in scheduler for unattended automations, can spawn isolated subagents for parallel work, and runs on any model provider you point it at, switched with one command.

• A real terminal interface: multiline editing, slash commands, history and streaming tool output.
• Memory the agent curates itself, with periodic nudges to persist knowledge, plus full-text search over past sessions.
• Skills that are created after complex tasks and improve as they are used, compatible with the open agent-skills standard.
• Seven terminal backends, from a local shell to Docker, SSH and serverless sandboxes that hibernate when idle.

How it differs from OpenClaw

Both are open source, both reach the same chat apps, both take skills. The difference is what each is built around: OpenClaw around acting in your apps on a schedule, Hermes around remembering you and getting better at your work. Hermes vs OpenClaw goes through it feature by feature, including the awkward gaps.

It creates skills from experience, improves them during use, and builds a deepening model of who you are.

What running it takes

A machine that stays on, a model provider, a gateway process to keep alive, and the same keys, updates and backups list as any agent. Nous offers its own hosted option, Hermes Cloud, billed per instance-day. Hosted Hermes on Diali is Diali’s version: a per-assistant plan with AI credits included, an isolated sandbox in the EU, and WhatsApp and SMS alongside the channels above.

Who it is for

• You want an assistant that knows you, not a workflow engine.
• You want it in Telegram or Slack all day, with a browser chat when you sit down at a desk.
• You want skills that improve with use rather than a fixed toolset.

And if the job is a workflow rather than a relationship, Hosted OpenClaw on Diali is the other engine, and one Diali account can run both.