a busy one. five new Wingtips, a wave of official Hermes ships (an independent reviewer for /review, a much bigger connectors catalog, real-profile browsing), two new models in Nous Portal, and the best run of community builds I have covered so far. no personal benchmark posts this week, so the local-ai section sits this one out.

this week's tips

five Hermes Wingtips this week, each verified against the live docs before posting:

• #53: the four files: SOUL.md is who your agent is, AGENTS.md is how one project works, MEMORY.md is what it has learned, USER.md is who you are to it. what each does, where each lives, and why the split exists.
• #54: session, project, profile, bot: the four container words in Hermes untangled. two hold your work, two are agents.
• #55: chaining cron jobs: context_from feeds one job's latest output into the next job's prompt, and continuity lets a recurring job read its own previous output so a scout stops re-reporting the same finds.
• #56: switching models when there is no terminal to click in: hermes model needs an interactive terminal, so in scripts and piped runs use /model <name> --provider <p> --global from any chat instead. it persists to config and switches the live session.
• #57: delegate_task: the built-in multi-agent team in one command. workers start with zero conversation knowledge, so the brief carries everything; delegation.model runs the workers on a cheaper model.

one from the local lane too:

• ep10: measure, don't hope: the GGUF file size is the floor of your VRAM plan, not the whole of it. a 21.3GB Q6_K read 24,866 MiB on the card at 64k context; run the model and read nvidia-smi before you trust the plan.

around the ecosystem

a heavy shipping week on the official side:

• /review now spawns an independent reviewer subagent on every surface, and you can set a separate auxiliary model just for review.
• the connectors catalog grew a lot: Cloudflare, Datadog, Metabase, GitLab, Railway, DeepWiki and more, with Tool Search keeping the new tools out of your context until you actually need them.
• mid-session model switching invalidates your prompt cache, so you repay the full input price after every switch. the cheaper path: pin delegation.model, keep the session on one model, and let the workers run on the inexpensive one.
• real-profile browsing: Hermes can browse as you, using the browser profile you use. off by default; switched on with browser.use_real_profile.
• the BackSearch plugin: point-in-time web search over a frozen news archive. every request carries an as-of date, so nothing after that date leaks into the answer.
• Grok 4.6 landed in Nous Portal at half price for a week, $1 in and $3 out per million tokens against the usual $2 and $6.
• my Grok 4.6 hands-on: one hermes -z task built a six-module feed watcher with 20 passing tests and a live three-feed pull, for about 15 cents at the discounted rate.
• Tencent's Hy4 preview went live in Nous Portal on day zero, around 20% under the public rate, with a million-token context window.
• what Nous Portal is, in one list: 300+ models, discounts under list price, hosted tools bundled in, one-click cloud hosting, one credit balance across all of it.

builders worth a look

the community had a very good week:

• forcewake's hermes-conductor: three months of Hermes as the one trusted controller over a fleet of coding CLIs, written up in a public MIT repo with pattern docs, two installable skills and a narrated demo.
• tonbi wiped an old laptop, installed Omarchy Quattro and carried his Hermes over on USB with /export and /import. personality, skills, memories and sessions travel; keys and credentials never leave the machine.
• tonbi again, on multi-gateway switching in the Desktop app: one Hermes Desktop can drive an SSH box or your local machine, and moving between gateways and their profiles got much easier.
• MichaelGannotti's tip for bot group chats: put your directions in the message and attach the content as a .md file. the docs back it: verbose pasted text is the top cause of context growth.
• luke's HUD mode now draws directly on your screen: it highlights where to click, where to move and what to look at.
• "Every Hermes Agent Concept Explained for Normal People" by Tom Crawshaw: one of the best videos to start with when you are new to Hermes Agent.
• psam_7's self-healing story: his local Hermes ssh'd into his droplet, spotted a session-storage problem unprompted, asked permission and fixed it. who better to debug Hermes than Hermes.
• Daniel bridged Bot Mode to Discord: hermes-discord-botrooms puts your Hermes bots in a Discord channel. MIT, approval-gated install, tokens stay in your existing credential stores.
• HolmeBengt's private-jet radar: a plane-obsessed couple near an airstrip had Hermes watch local airspace, ping them when a private jet approaches, and keep stats on origins and parking.
• MGT_maccha on briefing cron jobs: a cron run starts with no conversation history, but MEMORY.md and USER.md are read, so define inputs, outputs and end conditions up front, in the prompt itself.
• PoppaBear1950's private research portal: headless Hermes wired to an MCP web-research server, all self-hosted. everything stays yours.

that's the week. if any of the builds above catch your eye, the repos are linked from the posts. see you next sunday.