00:00:00OK, Hermes is an open-source AI agent created by American company News Research that is
00:00:06self-improving. So basically, the more you use it, the better it gets. It reflects,
00:00:10learns and evolves on its own, it never forgets anything you've said and it even creates its own
00:00:16skills. But is all of that enough to replace something like OpenClaw, which supports many
00:00:22more channels, has better sandboxing and is much more mature? Hit subscribe and let's get into it.
00:00:30So the name Hermes, surprise, surprise comes from the Greek messenger God. And that's also
00:00:37where this symbol comes from. You'll see more of it later on in the video. But as it stands,
00:00:42I've already made a video about OpenClaw, which is great, but has a lot of features that I won't
00:00:47personally use. And NanoClaw, which has a much smaller feature set, but is built on top of the
00:00:52Claude agent SDK, which is now less usable for me because of the weird rules around using the
00:00:59Claude subscription with third-party tools. So now I'm on the lookout for a new AI assistant
00:01:04and let's see if Hermes, the self-improving AI agent, can fill that void. I'm going to use it
00:01:09to create promotional tweets for me based on past videos that I've created. And I'm going to give it
00:01:14some scripts and directions to get to that stage. Now, this is quite a small task, but the focus is
00:01:20more to see if Hermes can remember my writing style and all the feedback I'm going to give it to create
00:01:26a tweet that I like without me asking it over and over again. Let's go. So I've already gone ahead
00:01:30and installed Hermes using this command, which is very simple and went through everything from
00:01:35collecting a model. I chose OpenRouter with Gemma 4, but if my hardware could handle it,
00:01:40I would run it locally and connect it to Hermes, messaging platforms and tools for the CLI. If you
00:01:45used OpenClaw, this whole process will feel very familiar. I've also set it up on a VPS to be on the
00:01:51safe side, but if you wanted to, you could easily install it locally on your machine. So from here,
00:01:55I'm going to write the Hermes command, which will start a new chat showing the Hermes symbol with
00:01:59the available tools and skills over here. Note, when you run the Hermes command, it creates a new
00:02:04session and doesn't resume the previous one unless you specify, just like called code. So here I'm
00:02:08going to give it a prompt. I want you to help me write tweets based on the scripts from my videos.
00:02:12Let's go through the process of doing that. After a while, it comes back with a response,
00:02:16which I like the structure of. And so I'm going to give it a follow-up prompt. I have scripts inside
00:02:21the scripts folder, study them to understand my writing style and voice. I've also given it my
00:02:25target audience and the length I'd like my tweets to be. So now it's using some tools to search
00:02:30through my files and after a while it analyses my script to give me a breakdown of my style.
00:02:34So it says I'm pragmatic and sceptical, which is true. I'm developer centric and I'm transparent
00:02:40and relatable. It's also come up with a strategy for my target audience, which I like the look of.
00:02:45But I've changed my mind. Even though I did say I wanted the tweets to be around 210 characters,
00:02:50I actually want them to be a bit longer. So I'm going to give it a new prompt. And I have noticed
00:02:54it's been taking a while and using a lot of context. So what I can do is change the model mid
00:02:59session by running the model slash command and specifying the model I want. In this case, I want
00:03:04GLM five turbo. So now it switched to that model. I'm going to give it a new prompt to make the
00:03:08tweets longer. And it comes back with response much faster, but has also added a lot of information to
00:03:13memory without me telling it. So it's changed the length from 210 to 400 and has changed the style
00:03:19of tweets that I want. Let's see if I can actually generate a decent tweak from my latest script.
00:03:23And it has come up with a pretty decent first attempt, but there are a few things that I won't
00:03:28personally say like breaking a sweat and I wouldn't use the word incredible. I'd use the phrase really
00:03:34good. And after a few tweaks is come up with a tweets that I would say I'd actually use in my
00:03:39profile. And it's safe that all to memory. I'm going to prompt it to create a skill. So it's easier for
00:03:44me to write tweets in the future. And now it sees the skill manager skill to go ahead and create a
00:03:49skill. Let's see this in action. And look at that it's written a tweet for me with multiple options,
00:03:54and I can select one I like the most. It's even gone ahead and created a thread that I can use
00:03:59to write multiple tweets if I wanted to. So technically, because it's remembered everything,
00:04:04if I create a brand new Hermes session, change the model from the default and ask it if it knows how
00:04:09I like to write my tweets, it comes back with a response telling me exactly how I like to write
00:04:14my tweets, even down to the type of emojis I like to use. Now you may be wondering how this Hermes
00:04:19able to pull all this information from memory without burning through your tokens. Well,
00:04:24memory is stored in an external file. So your memory.md file or an external processor like
00:04:30super memory, mem0 or open viking if you configure it. And memory is preloaded each session or pre-fetch.
00:04:38But it's not the full thing. In fact, it's a compacted version that's limited to about three
00:04:43and a half thousand characters, which is roughly 700 tokens depending on the model. But all sessions
00:04:49are stored inside an SQLite database using FTS5 for full text search. So if you ask Hermes to remember
00:04:56what you said yesterday, it will go into the database, do the search and give you that
00:05:01information. It also does something a bit weird. It compresses your session above 50% context window,
00:05:06which is different from something like Claude code, which does it at 80%. But I guess it's difficult to
00:05:11tell a good measure depending on the model. So 50% is a good rough number. But what it does is instead
00:05:17of just compressing the whole thing, it removes the output from old tool calls and keeps the head
00:05:23and tail of the session, but compresses the middle. This is what actually gets saved in the SQLite
00:05:28database, not the full conversation itself. It also nudges itself every 10 or so turns to save important
00:05:35information to memory and also to write a skill whenever that's necessary. Now I know it's very
00:05:39difficult to see the full power of Hermes in this very short demo session that I gave it, but hopefully
00:05:44you can kind of extrapolate how well it will remember and create skills based on the information
00:05:50you give it. And actually I'm going to be using it more often. So this month or maybe the month
00:05:54afterwards, I'm going to focus on using Hermes as my main personal assistant with a very cheap model
00:05:59like GLM and I'll let you know how it goes. But as usual, let me know your thoughts in the comments.
00:06:04Again, don't forget to subscribe and until next time, happy coding.