Hermes Agent: a free, self-hosted agent with skills, cron and a Kanban board

What it does

Hermes Agent is an open-source (MIT) agent from Nous Research with a terminal UI, a desktop app and a messaging gateway (Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email and more). It saves memory and agent-created skills across sessions, schedules jobs with a built-in cron tool, spawns subagents, and works with Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Commands can run locally, in Docker, over SSH, or on Modal, Daytona and other backends. The Kanban feature is a SQLite-backed task board, with a dashboard at 127.0.0.1:9119, that coordinates several Hermes profiles. A community plugin, hermes-seo, ports Claude SEO's 25 workflow skills, a router and 19 role skills; it is not an official Nous plugin. Release history: the first commit in NousResearch/hermes-agent is dated 23 July 2025, and the first tagged GitHub release, v2026.3.12, was published on 12 March 2026.

How builders use it

• Install with the one-line script, run hermes setup, then pick a provider and model with hermes model.
• Run hermes gateway setup and hermes gateway start so you can message the agent from Telegram or Slack.
• Schedule recurring work (reports, backups, audits) in plain language with the cron tool and have results delivered to a chat.
• Run hermes kanban init and hermes dashboard, put a task on the board and let the dispatcher split it across profiles.
• Optional: install the community hermes-seo plugin for site audits, and check its permissions first (it runs local scripts on the host).

What to expect

Scheduled reports and board-tracked tasks that run on your own server and report back to the chat you already use.

curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash
source ~/.bashrc
hermes setup          # full wizard
hermes model          # choose provider + model
hermes doctor

# Talk to it from Telegram/Slack/Discord:
hermes gateway setup
hermes gateway start

# Multi-agent board:
hermes kanban init
hermes dashboard      # http://127.0.0.1:9119 → Kanban

# ~/.hermes/config.yaml: keep human approval on
approvals:
  mode: smart
  cron_mode: deny

# Optional community SEO plugin (not official):
git clone https://github.com/yuzushi-dev/hermes-seo.git
mkdir -p "${HERMES_HOME:-$HOME/.hermes}/plugins"
cp -a hermes-seo "${HERMES_HOME:-$HOME/.hermes}/plugins/hermes-seo"
hermes plugins enable hermes-seo
hermes plugins doctor hermes-seo --ci