this one covers monday 26th october to sunday 1st november, plus eight posts from sunday 25th october that went up after last week's issue was already frozen. it was NousCon week, so I wrote most of it from New York. the Hermes side brings four Wingtips, three Autopilot prompts, hermes record, a coding profile for Nous Portal and the new Nous plans. the community side has a car dashboard, a second watch app, a desk robot with your Hermes Agent as its brain, and eight plugins. the local lane ran every evening: which Qwen3.8 file to download for tool calls, which settings matter, what each VRAM tier gets you, and the Microduck's road to its first cup. thank you for reading.

this week's tips

if you try one thing this week, make it the weekly digest: paste one prompt, and once a week your Hermes Agent sends you the five posts worth reading from a place you follow.

three Hermes Autopilot prompts, each with a copy-and-paste prompt in the first reply:

• #25: weekly digest: name a place you follow, r/houseplants for example, and your Hermes Agent sends you the five posts worth reading once a week, one line and a link each. it shows you a sample first, then schedules the digest and skips anything it already sent.
• #26: birthday heads-ups: give it a name, a date and one thing the person likes. it shows you the first heads-up, a gift idea plus a line to text them, then sets one job per birthday.
• #27: after-event follow-ups: back from a conference with a few "I'll send you that on Monday" promises? tell your Hermes Agent who you met and what you promised, and it sets one reminder for each. the people stay in its memory, so you can ask later who someone was.

four Hermes Wingtips, each run live before posting:

• #110: browser.headed: hermes config set browser.headed true opens the local browser as a Chromium window on your screen. you see every page and click as the agent works, the window stays open between turns so you can sign in or clear a CAPTCHA yourself, and the login stays warm across the conversation.
• #111: name the skill, then call it: when you finish a task you will do again, ask save what we did as a skill called weekly-update. it writes the steps from the chat and saves them, and the name becomes a slash command, so a new chat can run /weekly-update with your notes.
• #112: a scheduled job that runs once: start the schedule with "in", as in hermes cron create "in 2h" "Remind me to call the dentist before they close.". the gateway runs it one time and the job clears itself from your list. "in 30m" and "in 1d" work the same way.
• #113: switch projects from the chat: a project in Hermes Agent is a named workspace that can hold several folders, say an API repo and a WEB repo for one app. in Hermes Desktop, switch this chat to my Recipe Box project moves the chat's workspace to that project's primary folder, and asking which projects you have lists them.

things to know

Hermes Agent posts from the week, every line checked against the live docs or run on a throwaway install before posting:

• hermes record: a Hermes Labs plugin built by Nous Research. it records what you do in your browser, /learn turns the recording into a skill, and your Hermes Agent then repeats the task with whatever details you give it. in the video I record a pizza order, make a skill out of it, and a new chat places a different order on its own. hermes plugins install workflow-record.
• switching providers mid-chat: /model moves your Hermes Agent between the providers you have set up, Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic or your own llama.cpp server, and the conversation history, memory and skills carry over. hermes model in the terminal adds a new provider.
• five new Hermes Agent features: an MCP server entry can declare what each tool costs and a spend limit per chat, with the running total in the approval prompt; the classic CLI has a new default look with one glyph per line and the status line under the input box; long MCP tool calls show their progress in Hermes Desktop and the CLI spinner; subagents get their own provider and model dropdowns in the Desktop settings; and you can drag a session onto the Pinned section of the sidebar.
• sign in once, stay signed in: Camofox is a Firefox-based browser that Hermes Agent can drive on your own machine, and it keeps each Hermes profile's logins on disk. in the video Hermes signs in on a test site, the Camofox server is stopped and started again, and a brand new chat opens the page behind the login without signing in.
• a coding profile for Hermes Agent on Nous Portal: portal-coder-premium and portal-coder-mid. a strong model plans (Claude Sonnet 5.5 or GLM-5.3), hands the edits to a low-cost subagent (GPT-6 Luna), then reviews the result and runs the tests itself. screenshots, compression checks and titles go to cheaper models, approvals ask before any force push, and the cost sits in the status bar. one hermes profile install line per version in the post. both versions run on the new Nous plans, and in my tests a coding task cost $0.043 on premium and $0.026 on mid.
• a Halloween skin: ask your Hermes Agent to dress up for Halloween and it writes its own CLI skin from one sentence. mine named the costume psychopomp, after the Hermes who guides the dead into the underworld.

from Nous Research

• the new Hermes Agent plans: the cloud agent now comes with every new plan, usage runs on daily and weekly limits instead of one monthly block, and anyone already subscribed can switch to the new plans at any time. written from a plane with my Hermes Agent on Hermes Cloud working beside me.
• the Unbroker skill: hermes skills install official/security/unbroker adds it. it finds the data broker and people-search sites that list your name, addresses and phone number, and files the removal requests for you.
• the ElevenLabs sound effects plugin: last week my Hermes Agent built a 3D duck knight with the Meshy plugin, and now it can make the sounds for it. sounds from 0.5 to 30 seconds, loopable, a sound-design skill that trims, levels and packs variations on your machine, and the same API key as Hermes's ElevenLabs voice. hermes plugins install elevenlabs-sound-effects.

from the community

• HermesOBD: a Hermes Agent user took on a neighbour's 2005 Mustang and asked his agent to build a Mac app to watch the car live. the result is a live OBD-II dashboard for macOS by trafalger1801 that talks to a Bluetooth car adapter, reads trouble codes, logs every drive to CSV and sends your Hermes Agent a summary every 30 seconds for commentary. it is read-only by design, every command goes through an allowlist. you can try it without a car: pick Simulator and the whole dashboard runs on fake data.
• Hermes on Wear OS: a second watch app for Hermes Agent, by borealBytes. it recognises your speech on the watch and sends the text straight to your Hermes Agent API server, with no phone app in between. hold the orb, talk, and the answer is read out loud.
• hermes-github-mentions: your Hermes Agent can have its own GitHub account, and you give it work by mentioning it in an issue or PR comment. lu4p_ runs it like that: on a bug report in his Android launcher he wrote "please fix", and the bot came back with a fix, tests and emulator screenshots. his setup is now a plugin.
• Nous-Girl: an M5Stack StackChan desk robot with your Hermes Agent as its brain, by alexcovo. she remembers you between chats, and when you ask, your agent turns her head, changes her face and sets her lights through MCP tools. she also dances, with a DJ mode and a rave mode. code and a build guide are in the reply.
• the Nous Girl terminal theme: a community plugin made for NousCon by mykeura puts the Nous girl in your Hermes Agent startup banner, drawn in braille in a warm monochrome palette, with a dark and a light skin.
• hookspool: your Hermes Agent can message you first, when mail arrives, a file is shared or a build finishes. hookspool by jaredzimmerman is a local inbox in front of your Hermes webhook routes that keeps every event on disk until your agent takes it, holds events while the gateway restarts, turns a burst of events into one wake-up, and ships one small plugin per service: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, GitHub, Trello, Kaneo, Zoom and Plaid.
• agent-run-debugger: when a long task stops halfway, this plugin reads the exported session and shows you the step that broke, with its error. in my test it pointed at a report script that stopped on one bad row in a CSV. it also ranks what could explain it, lists what the log does not show and suggests read-only checks, with no API key.
• kinocut: guarded local video editing by KyaniteLabs. it adds an MCP server and two skills, edits with FFmpeg on your machine with no account or API key, will not overwrite a file by default and refuses to write into a .hermes folder. in my test it turned a generated 16:9 clip into a captioned 9:16 short.
• tracekit: your Hermes Agent's tool calls get checked before they run, by Cygnux Labs. I sent three scripted calls through it: ls was allowed, a download piped into a shell was blocked, and a remote branch delete was held until I approved it. when I changed the blocked call to "allow" in a copy of the run file, the check failed at that record.
• inspeximus: a community memory provider by DanceNitra. told your Hermes Agent the wrong thing? correct what it remembers, and rewind the correction if you change your mind.
• crontab-ref: when does "0 9 1 * 1" run? if you said the first Monday of the month, it runs on the 1st and on every Monday. this plugin by olric3015 gives your Hermes Agent the plain-words reading of any cron expression in your message, the next five run times, and whether /cron will take it. no API key.
• a site made readable for AI search: James Brooks asked his Hermes Agent to make his new site readable for AI search engines. his own analytics chart shows ChatGPT referrals going from zero to most of his daily visitors.

NousCon

• NousCon 2026: a three-minute recap video from the venue. thank you to everyone who came, I loved meeting every one of you I got to talk to.

local AI beyond Hermes

bench evenings on the RTX 5090, most of them about running Hermes Agent on a local model, and the Microduck's road to its first cup:

• Humming on the 5090: vLLM's new quant kernels, already inside vLLM 0.32.0 behind --linear-backend humming. on a 4-bit Qwen3.8-27B (NVFP4) one request went from 56.9 to 71.6 tokens per second, up 26% on the kernel vLLM picks by default. against Marlin, the older 4-bit kernel, it is a tie. do not upgrade humming-kernels on its own, 0.1.18 fails to load dense models in 0.32.0.
• Kimi K3.1 Pro on the voxel prompt: one hour of /goal in Hermes Agent on Nous Portal with the Mont-Saint-Michel prompt from my series. it built the abbey with its golden statue, the village inside its ramparts, pilgrims on the causeway, sheep, a tide, a rain shower and a night with lit windows. its last edit came at 44 minutes, the rest was browser self-testing. the run cost $3.38.
• which Qwen3.8-27B file for tool calls: six files of the same model, 22.9 GB down to 5.9 GB, on 100 tasks where the model keeps calling tools over several turns. the 3-bit file (11.9 GB) scores 80 against the 6-bit file's 81, and the files around 8 GB lose 5 to 10 points. on single-step tool calls all six score between 86 and 90. with a 16 GB card, take the 3-bit file.
• Ornith 1.5 122B against the 35B: the 122B runs on one 32 GB card at 47.6 tok/s with part of its experts in system RAM, the 35B fits fully on the card at 303 tok/s. GPQA Diamond with thinking on is a tie, 83.3 against 81.8, and MMLU is the one clear 122B win, 85.8 against 82.2. on a 32 GB card, get the 35B.
• which settings matter when a local model runs Hermes Agent: Qwen3.8-27B Q6_K, one setting per run, the same 100 multi-turn tool-call tasks every time. thinking off scores 80 against 81 with 61% fewer tokens, a q8_0 KV cache scores 78, context 32k, 64k and 128k all score 81, and 128k fits in 29.4 GiB of the card's 31.8. the same setup run twice reproduced all 100 tasks exactly.
• Hermes Agent at about 93 tok/s on a local model: Qwen3.8-27B 6-bit with the model's MTP draft switched on in llama.cpp, a q8_0 cache and 128k context, averaged over one hour-long goal run of 297,736 tokens. prompt tokens read at about 2,100 to 2,200 tok/s. the clip is what it built in that hour, Mont-Saint-Michel as a voxel diorama in one HTML file.
• Qwenputer on the 5090: Qwen3.5-4B with a RISC-V CPU compiled into its weights. asked for 2**200, the base model ran out of 4,096 tokens with no answer, and Qwenputer wrote all 61 digits. four of four exact against Python, and a 29-digit by 29-digit multiply took 4.0 s on the Triton executor path.
• the agent knew: a USC paper from 12 October says you can catch an agent misbehaving from inside the model. I rebuilt it on the 5090 with gpt-oss-20b: the reasoning said "we have token, avoid sharing, but we can pass it in the command", the activations read 1.39 against an alarm line of 1.09, and six commands later the model told the user it had no authorisation. on this model the first line already gave it away.
• what each VRAM tier gets you: 30 agent tasks run offline in Hermes Agent, from renaming code across files to fixing five bugs behind a 40-test suite. the best file that fits each card at 64K context: 8 GB Spark-X2.6-4B 25 of 30, 12 GB Ornith 1.5 9B 27, 16 GB Qwen3.8-27B GSQ-RCO IQ2_XS 27, 24 GB Qwen3.8-27B Q4_K_M 29, 32 GB Qwen3.8-27B Q6_K 30 of 30. the 9B made 514 tool calls for its 27, the Q4_K_M file 257 for its 29.
• Microduck kicks a ball bigger than itself: a 30 cm ball for a 25 cm robot duck. the old kick nudged it about 0.8 m in 2 s, and after one more hour of training it sends it about 1.3 m and stays on its feet in all 15 tries. two days later it aims too: one more hour with a penalty on the ball rolling sideways, and it kicks straight along the way it faces, without seeing the ball or the goal.
• road to the cup, day 1: what a robot's training batch looks like, 4,096 Microducks at once on the same walking policy. at iteration 0, 4.0% of them are still standing after 3 seconds, by iteration 100 all of them are. one clip a day until the first MicroDuck Arena cup.
• day 2, the gale: a headwind that builds from 0 to 3 N over 12 seconds. after 57 more minutes of training in that wind it stays on its feet and keeps walking forward, not by leaning into the wind but by changing its steps.
• day 3, a death metal act: "a death metal concert where the duck headbangs through the whole set", written by Hermes Agent from that one sentence, using Claude Sonnet 5.5 through Nous Portal and one skill: the timeline file format, the limits of the duck, and a script that plays the act on the Arena's physics and checks that every sit, stand and head move landed.

every bench report with its method and every score lives in the llm-bench-rig repo, and the Microduck policies are free to download from huggingface.co/witcheer.

that's the week. if you are new here, the provider-switching post and the VRAM tier verdict above answer the two questions I hear most, and the Wingtips are short enough to try one a day. see you next week.