this one covers monday 5th to sunday 11th october, plus four posts from sunday 4th that went up after last week's issue was already frozen. a big week for Nous Research: Hermes Index went live on Nous Portal, Hermes Agent landed in the Microsoft Store, two models went free on Nous Portal for a while, and the team published a note on its $90 million fundraise. on my side it was onboarding week: seven Wingtips, four Autopilot prompts, five question-and-answer posts for people getting started, and a lot of community builds, from a pocket charm to a whole operating system. thank you for reading.

this week's tips

seven Hermes Wingtips, each run live before posting:

• #91: files in your Telegram chat: your Hermes Agent can send you files on Telegram, not only text. ask for the format in your message, "send me that as a PDF", and the file arrives in the chat as an attachment. a chart comes through as an image, a table as a spreadsheet.
• #92: Nous Portal in one command: on a fresh install, hermes setup --portal logs your agent in to Nous Portal, sets Nous as your provider and turns on the Tool Gateway. your browser opens for the login, you pick a model, and you are back in the terminal. with any paid Nous Portal plan, that same login gives your agent web search, image generation, text-to-speech and a cloud browser, with no extra API key.
• #93: let your Hermes Agent install its own skills: you do not need the skill's name or the install command. ask in plain words, "find a skill for flashcards and install it.", and the agent picks a match, runs the security scan and tells you what to say to use it.
• #94: attach a file to your message: type @, pick file: from the menu, then add the file's name and your question: @ file:meeting-notes.md turn this into a to-do list. the whole file goes in as part of your message, no copy and paste.
• #95: let your agent keep checking for you: /loop 5m check build.log and tell me when the build is done runs the same prompt again every few minutes, inside the chat you are already in. handy while a build or a deploy is running.
• #96: take back your last message: /undo removes your last message and the agent's reply from the chat. the agent carries on from the message before it, so you can ask again the way you meant.
• #98: set your agent's timezone: hermes config set timezone America/New_York puts the agent clock and your cron schedules on your zone, so a job set for 8am runs at 8am where you are. use your zone's IANA name, like Europe/London or Asia/Kolkata. (#97 moved to sunday, so it lands in next week's issue.)

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:

• #14: memory gaps: what you have told your Hermes Agent more than once that it still has not saved to memory, in one memory-gaps.txt. it searches your past chats for what you repeated and checks each one against its memory.
• #15: pick how your Hermes Agent talks to you: three voices, each one answering a question you asked it before. it reads how you write in your past chats and adds the voice you pick to the end of its SOUL.md.
• #16: a morning briefing in your Telegram: built from what you tell your agent about your day. it asks about your mornings, then schedules the briefing and saves three facts about you to memory.
• #17: ten things to ask your Hermes Agent this week: picked from the tools and skills it has and what it knows about you. it runs one of them for you first, then writes all ten to a text file you can paste from.

five things to know

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

• several agents, one Hermes Agent: a profile is a separate Hermes home directory with its own config, memory, skills, sessions, cron jobs and model. hermes profile create work makes one, and it becomes its own command. each profile runs its own gateway with its own bot token, so work and life can be two separate Telegram bots. in Hermes Desktop, Bot Mode turns your profiles into a roster of Bots that message each other, and Hermes Kanban is a task board shared across all of them.
• what to give your Hermes Agent first, by job: five jobs people asked about, each with a prompt to paste: a job-hunt tracker with a weekday search, deep research split between subagents, a folder of notes turned into the week's plan, language practice, and selling old gear.
• memory in Hermes Agent: native memory is on by default and keeps its notes in MEMORY.md and USER.md on your disk; a memory provider adds semantic search and knowledge graphs on top. the llm-wiki skill builds a knowledge base as interlinked markdown files that work as an Obsidian vault. hermes journey shows what it remembers, and memory: write_approval: true in config.yaml makes it ask before every save.
• keeping your Hermes Agent up to date: how to update by install type (the desktop app offers a one-click update, Hermes Cloud updates itself, a source install runs hermes update), hermes update --check and --plan to see what will happen first, the stable channel on Desktop and Docker, and the quick backup hermes update takes before it starts, with /snapshot restore <id> to put one back.
• picking models for Hermes Agent: Hermes Index to compare up to four models on completion and cost per task, one Nous Portal subscription for the whole catalogue, /model <name> to switch mid-chat (--global to save it, --once for a single turn), hermes model to give side jobs like compression and image analysis a cheaper model, and the Free plan for the free models.

from Nous Research

• Hermes Index: a page on Nous Portal that scores models on what they get done inside Hermes Agent and what each task costs. four suites, all run in the Hermes Agent harness: Hermes Bench, TerminalBench 4, TerminalBench Science and SkillsBench. Hermes Bench is 150 tasks across 25 categories, each one starting in a workspace with real files, and the grader checks what the agent left behind. you can filter to open weights only, or compare up to four models side by side. this is the page I now point people to when they ask which model to run.
• Hermes Agent in the Microsoft Store: live and featured. open the Microsoft Store, find Hermes Agent, click Get.
• a note on the fundraise: Nous Research raised $90 million, with NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures among the investors. the note is at nousresearch.com/a-note-on-our-fundraise.
• Solar Mini 4, free on Nous Portal for two weeks: Upstage's model with 3B active parameters and 512K context. hermes setup --portal if you are new, then /model upstage/solar-mini4:free in any chat, --global to keep it.
• MISSINGNO., free on Nous Portal for a limited time: a stealth coding and agentic reasoning model with 262K context, tool calling and reasoning effort from low to max. same three steps, with /model stealth/missingno.
• the promo board on Nous Portal: on sunday 4th, 24 models at 25% to 88% off their list price and 9 completely free, in a 20-second screen recording. /model in any chat switches your agent over.
• Hermes Agent as an RL environment: Hugging Face turned Hermes Agent and other coding harnesses into reinforcement-learning environments, with no changes to the harness, so you can train open models inside Hermes Agent as it ships.
• ASUS ProArt RTX Spark laptops: up to 128GB of memory to run big models locally, with Hermes Agent driving ComfyUI from plain language.

hermes desktop, on video

• keep talking while subagents work: ask for parallel work, "spawn three subagents in parallel" with one job each, and the chat stays free while they run. send a follow-up mid-run and the agent folds it into the combined answer.
• a fresh Hermes Agent install on Linux: from the one-line installer to a first finished task in Hermes Desktop. Quick Setup signs in with Nous Portal, so there are no API keys to paste. 7 minutes in total.
• Tonbi's Bot Screen demo: building an app with your agent, tested in the same screen the agent builds it on. each bot gets its own desktop on your gateway host, streamed live into Hermes Desktop; you can take over, hand control back, and it keeps working after you close the app.

from the community

• Agent Charm: a pocket charm for Hermes Agent on an ESP32-S3 board with a mic and a speaker. hold the button and ask your agent out loud; the answer comes back as a short card on a small Amoled screen plus two spoken sentences, and a little character shows what is happening. there is a Mac simulator if you want to try it without the hardware.
• 305 open devices your Hermes Agent plugs into: Teknium's hermes-devices catalogue. plugins are one of the ways in: every plugin is reviewed by a human before listing, installs are pinned to the reviewed commit, hermes plugins install <name> adds one, and Home Assistant is an official plugin for your smart home.
• Herald OS: Luke open-sourced an operating system with Hermes Agent built in. say "Hey Hermes" and talk to your computer, select any part of your screen and ask about it. runs as a Mac app, a full Linux OS, an Arch package or inside Omarchy.
• Hermes Gadget SDK: Adolan's SDK came out on saturday 3rd, and by wednesday people had Hermes Agent running on watches, desk gadgets and old Android phones, with 17 community PRs merged.
• Caduceus, five months on: built for the Hermes Agent Creative Hackathon in May, still running, and now showing the news on its own screen.
• a family Hermes Agent: Sergey set up a profile that knows each family member and a Telegram group with them. it plans their days, a cafe nearby, things to do at the aquarium, and everyone sees every answer. you do not need to be technical to get a lot out of it.
• 371 user stories: 45 new stories from people using Hermes Agent for work went on the user-stories page on tuesday, among them Razorpay giving 220+ employees their own agent, a physician saving 30 to 45 minutes of documentation per case, and a Swiss web agency drafting its client invoices. if you are new, here is how to use that page as a starting point: filter by the category closest to your day, open a story that sounds like you, paste it to your agent.
• two more sections of the video map are now YouTube playlists: skills, four videos on which skills to install and how to write your own, and teams of agents, six videos on multi-agent setups with Kanban, Bot Mode and cron jobs. playlist links sit in the first reply of each post.
• what you asked for in Hermes Desktop: 80+ replies to my question. a mobile app was the loudest ask by far, then threads, folders and labels inside each bot, a lead bot that runs the others, and a message when a bot's task is done. remote gateways (Settings, Gateways), Simple mode and VS Code Marketplace themes are already in the app.
• a six-month working setup: someone on r/hermesagent shared theirs: memory keeps the facts that matter in every conversation, a nightly cron job reviews the day's sessions and tidies skills and memory, and a script-only cron job takes daily, weekly and monthly backups. I asked for yours under that post.
• for plugin builders: the plugin catalogue now holds 400+ reviewed plugins from 300+ community builders. if you have built one, I am collecting what would make the plugin API and structure work better for you, and taking the replies to the team working on it.

local AI beyond Hermes

one contest board and two duck sessions on the 5090 this week:

• Microduck gets up off its back: in the simulator, in about a second. seven training runs of my own never got it there. what worked was Pollen's method: whenever my walking policy ends up on the ground, it is trained to copy their stand-up policy. the clip shows the old walk on the left and the new one on the right.
• AIME and HMMT on nine local models: Gemma 4 31B solved 51 of the 63 problems in this year's AIME and HMMT Feb contests on my RTX 5090, the most of the nine. the reason is answer length: I cap each answer at 32k tokens, thinking included, and Gemma's median answer used about 8,300 to 9,000 tokens, with none of its 63 hitting the cap. the other eight ran out of room on 6 to 22 problems per contest. with a bigger cap the order could move, and I have not measured that yet.
• microduck-lab on GitHub: the small script Hermes Agent calls to tell the duck to stand, walk, look or stop, plus my scripts for recording and scoring training runs and some fixes to Pollen's rough-terrain training. Apache-2.0.

that's the week. if you are new here, Flightplan #4 is still the place to start, and Hermes Index is now the page for the "which model" question. see you next week.