this one covers monday 28th september to sunday 4th october, plus six posts from sunday 27th that went up after last week's issue was already frozen. no new tag this week, so the news is Nous Portal and the Desktop: Sign in with ChatGPT landed on Nous Portal, Claude Sonnet 5.5 is live in Hermes Agent, and I filmed six short Hermes Desktop walkthroughs. six Wingtips, three Autopilot prompts, a map of 34 community videos, three meetups on the calendar, and the duck learned to climb stairs. the almanac also passed 100 subscribers this week, with a shout-out from Luke. thank you for reading.

this week's tips

six Hermes Wingtips, each run live before posting:

• #85: hermes pause: one command stops your Hermes Agent from starting new work. while it is on, no cron job fires, no kanban task is dispatched and your gateway bots start no new turns. hermes resume lifts it. useful when a scheduled job does something you did not expect, or before you change a skill your cron jobs use.
• #86: hermes send: one command sends a message from any script to the platforms your Hermes Agent is already set up on. it uses your gateway's bot credentials and makes no model call. hermes send --to telegram "deploy finished", or pipe anything into it: tail -n 20 build.log | hermes send --to telegram. handy in cron scripts, CI jobs, or as a ping when a long training run is done.
• #87: /handoff: mid-conversation in the terminal and you have to leave your desk? type /handoff telegram and the session moves to your Telegram home channel with its full history. the agent replies there with a short summary of where you left off, and you carry on from your phone.
• #88: /context: your context window holds more than your messages: the system prompt, the tool definitions, your memory, any project rules and the conversation so far. /context gives you a breakdown of the window by what fills it, with the free space that is left. worth a look before a long session, or when you want to see how close a chat is to compressing.
• #89: /branch: it copies your conversation into a new session, history included, and you carry on in the copy. useful before a big change of direction, or to compare two answers from the same starting point.
• #90: /blueprint: a ready-made automation for your Hermes Agent. Hermes asks you what it needs, one question at a time, then schedules it as a cron job; you write no cron syntax. /blueprint learn-daily gives you a short lesson on a topic you pick every weekday morning. other blueprints cover a reminder in your own words, or a weekly meal plan with the grocery list.

hermes autopilot

prompts you paste into your agent, which then does the work. the prompt sits in the first reply, the proof run in the second:

• #10: a docs to-do list from your open PRs: your agent reads the ten newest diffs, drafts the missing line for each new command, flag or setting, and names the doc section it belongs in.
• #11: a reply draft: a reply to the thread, review or comment in front of you, drafted from what you want to say. it reads the page and every reply, quotes the line you answer and flags what it could not check.
• #12: open loops: what you told your Hermes Agent you would do and have not done yet, in one open-loops.txt. it searches your chats from the last 30 days and puts a date on each line; anything a later chat shows as done stays out.
• all the prompts on one page: the prompts index on the recipes site held ten entries when it went up on tuesday, from "make your agent know how you work" to the docs to-do list; #11 and #12 have joined it since.

the long read

two question-and-answer posts this week, every line checked against the live docs:

• where should I run Hermes Agent?: the question came up four times on r/hermesagent in one night. the Docker guide lists 1 GB of memory and 1 CPU core as the minimum, 2 to 4 GB with 2 cores recommended; the model does not have to run on that machine, Nous Portal or a local server over an API both work; 64-bit ARM is in the first support tier; sudo hermes gateway install --system keeps your bots answering after you close SSH; paste install commands over SSH rather than into a provider's browser console; and if you would rather not run a server, Hermes Cloud puts your agent online from Nous Portal, with Hermes Business for a whole team.
• Sign in with ChatGPT, your questions answered: Nous Research partnered with OpenAI to bring Sign in with ChatGPT to Nous Portal. the Codex login in hermes model still works and stays on one machine; the new sign-in links your ChatGPT plan to your Nous Portal account instead, and Hermes Agent shows up by name in your ChatGPT settings, where you see its usage and set a weekly cap. it counts toward the ChatGPT Work and Codex usage in your plan, stops at the cap unless you allow apps to use credits, shares only your name, email and profile picture, needs ChatGPT Plus or Pro, and lives under Nous Portal, Account Settings, Linked Accounts.

what changed this week

no new tag this week; these are the changes I posted about:

• Claude Sonnet 5.5 is live in Hermes Agent: Tommy announced it on monday night; if you have tried it, I am collecting early feedback under that post.
• any language, via plugin: Teknium showed that a plugin can now add a full new language across all of Hermes Agent's surfaces, on top of the 16 already supported.
• hermes update is faster: Teknium came back from holiday with an update step about four times quicker. the Desktop build takes about 22 seconds on Linux, the TUI and web UI are skipped when nothing in them changed, and on Windows the syntax check runs in about a second.
• Discord setup, checked for you: Teknium previewed a Discord setup that checks your token with Discord and asks again if it is wrong, links you to the Message Content Intent and re-checks it, prints an invite link with the right permissions, and allowlists you as owner without Developer Mode.
• NeMo Relay tracing with NVIDIA: a walkthrough written by NVIDIA and Nous together. a Hermes Agent run leaves a full trace, every model call, tool call, retry and error with its timing, which you open in Arize Phoenix.
• portal-affordable, a low-spend profile for Nous Portal: my own release. DeepSeek V4 Flash as the main model and for compression, Ling 3.0 Flash VL for vision with two fallbacks, GPT-5 Nano for risky-command checks, Ling 3.0 Flash for session titles and small side tasks, cost shown in the status bar. the side tasks stay pinned to their own models when you /model up for a hard turn. every pick came from my own test runs through the Portal API; the method and the numbers are in the README, and hermes profile install takes the GitHub url.

hermes desktop, on video

short screen recordings, 30 to 40 seconds each, plus two longer tours from Tonbi:

• Simple mode, three ways in: chat only, the technical panes fold away. Cmd+K (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) and type "simple"; or Settings, Appearance, Window & layout, Interface mode; or Cmd+Shift+\ for the layout editor and pick Simple. Advanced brings your old layout back as you left it.
• typography: Settings, Appearance, Typography, or Cmd+K and type "font". UI Scale runs from 90% to 175% for text and controls across the whole app, and Chat Font takes the name of any font installed on your machine. "Use theme font" and 100% bring the default look back.
• Bot Screen, take over and hand back: on the Linux machine that runs your gateway, hermes computer-use screen install, then hermes config set browser.headed true. in Hermes Desktop: Bots, right-click your bot, Open Screen, Start. ask it to open a login page and stop at the sign-in; click Take over, sign in, click Hand back and tell it to continue. the bot keeps that login for later sessions until the site expires it.
• @url: in any message: type @ in the message box, pick @url:, paste a link and ask your question; the page is fetched and attached before your agent reads it. the same menu attaches a file, a folder, your git changes and your recent commits.
• the Memory Graph: everything your agent has learned for you, as a map. gold dots are skills, blue diamonds are memories, the oldest sit in the centre. hover to see which one it is, right-click to edit or delete (a deleted skill is archived and can be restored). type /journey in a chat, or Cmd/Ctrl+K and Memory Graph.
• the Connectors page: an MCP server in one click. Capabilities, Connectors, search the catalog (DeepWiki in the video, which answers questions about any public GitHub repo), click Install, and the card lists the tools it brings. open a new chat and ask for it by name.
• Tonbi's tour of the Skills tab: your skills and the whole catalog as cards, switched on per profile, in under three minutes.
• Tonbi's week of Desktop updates: drag and drop sessions between Projects, new themes, a chat text size separate from the UI text, model picker favourites, and a review pane with Uncommitted, Branch and Last Turn scopes. my pick is the favourites: star the two or three models you switch between and they sit at the top.

from the community

• a map of the Hermes Agent videos worth watching: 34 videos from 29 channels, sorted into six sections by what you want to do with it: start here, running a business on it, real setups and use cases, skills, teams of agents, and by job.
• the first three sections are now YouTube playlists: start here, six videos in order with NetworkChuck's added; running a business on it, seven videos; and real setups and use cases, six videos. the other three follow.
• Alex Finn's month of updates: a 13-minute video covering Bot mode, local AI mode, the improved subagents, the Hermes HUD and the rest of September's changes.
• demo walkthroughs, a job for your agent: MystiqueMide records most of his demos with Hermes from Telegram. the pieces are already in your Hermes Agent: browser automation and computer use for the clicks, ffmpeg through the terminal tool for the cut, video attachments back in the chat app, and a skill once a take works.
• Twilio's Hermes Agent tutorial: Twilio's developer blog shows your agent on its own phone number, over SMS.
• hermes-streamdeck: Mugen0815's Stream Deck plugin. Start Run sends a saved prompt and shows the run live on the key, Steer Run adds guidance while it works, Stop Run ends it. prompts come from your clipboard or a small input box, every answer is saved as a markdown file, and when Hermes asks for approval the key turns orange and a local page shows you the full command.

meetups and talks

• Kuala Lumpur: the first official Hermes event in Malaysia, two full-day workshops by Kracked Devs at The AI Builder School in KL Eco City, 3 and 17 October, 30 seats each.
• Stockholm, 15 October: Alper Aydemir hosts a Hermes Agent meetup at Volumental HQ, with presentations, a mingle, snacks and beer. the Luma page also has an online link. if you want to host one where you live, tell us.
• NousCon 2026: 30 October in New York. I will be there.
• Tommy at Freedom Tech DC: a talk on why open agent harnesses matter. with Hermes Agent your memory and skills are plain files you own, and you pick the model provider yourself.

local AI beyond Hermes

one bench run and two duck sessions on the 5090 this week:

• walks v2, with gear play: I added a bit of wobble to every joint of my Microduck in the simulator, the same slop a real servo gearbox has, then retrained its walk for about an hour more. it still walks: the flat walk stayed on its feet in 4 of 5 runs, the walk-and-recover in 6 of 7.
• MATH-500 at 32k: three local models scored about 72 on competition maths at a 16k-token thinking cap, because 27 to 30% of their answers ran out of room. with 32k they scored 90 to 92: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B 72.8 to 91.2, Qwen3.6-27B 73.2 to 92.0, Qwable-27B 71.6 to 90.0. when they finish an answer they are right about 96% of the time, at 12,300 to 13,300 tokens per correct answer. Qwen3.8-27B scored 95.2 on the same test at 16k with about 1,800 tokens per correct answer.
• walk-recover-rough on Hugging Face: the walking policy retrained on rough ground, stairs, slopes and block grids ordered from easy to hard, about 3 hours. on the hardest stairs it now stays on its feet in 2 of 3 takes; the flat-ground version fell in all 3.

that's the week. the survey above is new: one click tells me what to give you more of. if you are new here, Flightplan #4 is still the place to start. see you next week.