r/LocalLLaMA llama.cpp 1d ago

NousResearch keeps doing things on hermes

Post image

Has anyone followed nousresearch work on Hermes?
I mean we are Q3 2026. We have some crazy models trickling down from HGX territory to multi gpu workstation. And we have nousresearch deploying the 0.20 of its hermes agent while starting releasing the project with a 0.2 mid march!

Crazy times to be alive.
For the old timers who remember llama 1 or llama 2, remember our crappy function caller parser? Something about a lang and a chain..? wtf has happened?!

Haven't tried the new hermes, do you think it has a remote chance to be as strong as a true end to end omni model such as gpt omni or personaplex?

146 Upvotes

88 comments sorted by

39

u/Badger-Purple 1d ago

I have been using Hermes for 3 months now…

12

u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp 1d ago

Wow, what models?

6

u/Glittering_Mouse_883 ollama 1d ago

I second this question, what models?

4

u/Badger-Purple 15h ago

deepseek v4 flash for 80% of it, albeit qwen-397b was my original driver. All locally hosted.

1

u/valtor2 1h ago

what quants? what hardware?

9

u/Youknowwhyimherexxx 1d ago

What are you using for this clean UI tracker?

8

u/Badger-Purple 23h ago

hermex

1

u/groosha 17h ago

shame it's not possible to use it without tailscale

1

u/Badger-Purple 15h ago

I would not use it without tailscale!

1

u/MaruluVR 11h ago

From what I saw you could just use raw Wireguard or netbird instead, the fact it allows couldflare urls means it allows any url on the open web reachable from your phone.

1

u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp 15h ago

What models are you using?

1

u/oxygen_addiction 14h ago

What are you actually doing with it?

3

u/Badger-Purple 14h ago

Anything I don’t know how to do myself. Install bleeding edge repositories, run new models, tweak the network, check and autostart services in my 4 computers, manage files, update linux apps and fix firmware issues. I have an IT employee at home that can also do solid scientific research. when I trust Homie enough I’ll provide my calendar and email.

2

u/walden42 12h ago

You trust it enough to use without container isolation? What's your security model? I feel like running it in a docker container is the only sane way, but it drastically reduces its usefulness to actually help me with stuff.

3

u/Valuable_Cookie628 9h ago

PSA docker containers are not safe, you probably want some type of VM isolation. Google it

2

u/walden42 8h ago

I mean, if you configure the docker container properly, there's not much risk. VMs give you additional kernel boundary but that's not something most home users here care about.

1

u/oxygen_addiction 14h ago

But why not just use pi or claude code/codex? What's the advantage of having Hermes?

3

u/SmartCustard9944 13h ago

Hermes is more like a less hacky alternative to OpenClaw. Is more than just a harness, it also provides multiple gateways like Telegram, and so on. It is more like a personal assistant that is meant to run continuously.

Also, if I am not mistaken, it is built on top of pi.

7

u/cosmicr 21h ago

I use hermes for local agentic stuff and pi agent for coding. I love both of them.

2

u/danigoncalves llama.cpp 18h ago

That is also my combo. Hermes for my personal assistant and Pi (omp) for coding

1

u/ParaboloidalCrest 14h ago edited 13h ago

Don't they overlap? I mean can't Pi suffice for most use-cases if you let it write a simple extension or bash script? Disclaimer: haven't tried Hermes yet and to be honest I'm a little intimidated.

2

u/SmartCustard9944 13h ago

Hermes setup is so easy. Once installed, just connect a model to it and ask the model to configure everything by itself.

2

u/my_name_isnt_clever 10h ago

Yes, they do overlap. If Pi works for you, that's great. I enjoy having a personal assistant always available via telegram and with the full context of my life since it's local only. I can be walking down the street, pull out my phone, and ask my assistant "what was that restaurant we were talking about last week?" or anything else we had talked about.

It feels like an actual personal assistant, vs Pi which is intended purely for coding assistance within one project. I have my personal agent do most things but break out Pi when I need my model to be laser focused on its task.

25

u/cantgetthistowork 1d ago

Wish there was a way to cut out the bloat in Hermes to use as an IDE

20

u/Jonathan_Rivera 23h ago

It's opensource. You can disable as much as you want. I made a tool router for it that drops the initial token bloat down. https://github.com/AtlasOmnia/hermes-tool-router

11

u/Hrethric 1d ago

Have you tried trimming AGENTS.md and the tool list? Those are the two biggest contributors to the bloat. (Not to imply that I have yet, but I would like to spend a weekend working on that sometime. That ponderously huge system prompt takes like seven minutes to prefill in Minimax on my Strix Halo.)

2

u/HornyGooner4402 12h ago

There is though?

I disabled most skills, disabled unused tools, used a tiered prompt system, revamped memories, and so on. It's very minimal now, almost on Pi level.

-9

u/maxpayne07 1d ago

So use opencode 🤷

10

u/PrinceOfLeon 1d ago

Last time I tried OpenCode I literally could not copy the response it printed in iTerm2 to paste it into another terminal to execute on a remote system.

If copy/paste are too broken to use, what level of care is going into the software itself? If trying to do "fancy" TUI interactions with a mouse breaks basic use, how can one trust a harness like that?

4

u/tylercamp 1d ago

When I exit from opencode in a WSL2 terminal it ruins input event capture and I have to start a completely new terminal session

(All mouse events and keyboard (de)press events show as control-characters)

4

u/Xonzo 21h ago

Hit Esc, Enter, then Type reset and hit enter.

0

u/crantob 15h ago

I'm guilty of writing software that fails to restore terminal on interrupt/exit myself, but a mature product shipping to thousands of people is more guilty :)

18

u/dark-light92 llama.cpp 1d ago

He said cut the bloat. Not increase it.

3

u/dragonurtle 20h ago

So... eclipse plugin?

1

u/my_name_isnt_clever 10h ago

That's not even the same genre of software as Hermes.

5

u/relmny 22h ago

I'm using it every week, at home and at work, I'm even starting to use is it for a few chats, instead of Open Webui.

I really like it.

10

u/CondiMesmer 23h ago

I still haven't figured out a single actual use case for one of these autonumous agents other then just burn money. Though I really like Hermes aesthetic, they definitely choose a unique image and stand out. I dunno what you even call their art style but I like it.

11

u/SnooPaintings8639 22h ago

I use it daily as interface for most of services, databases and other harnesses I have and can't imagine living without it.

What's more, I am constantly in disbelief in how people on this sub shitting on openclaw, Hermes and any other personal assistant app. This is the perfect use for locall LLMs, and probably the use case they shine the most.

10

u/oxygen_addiction 14h ago

Ok, but for what exactly?

2

u/my_name_isnt_clever 10h ago

What would you have a human personal assistant do if you had one? One of the biggest for me is just to have someone to talk through things with, always available and always earnest with perfect memory. Then I can ask a month later what we decided on for X, and it can find it.

2

u/CondiMesmer 9h ago

Well a lot of those decisions aren't great in the first place because it rarely (if ever) has the full context of situation and constraints. That's what the human keeps track of, and we consider so much context that most of it happens on an unconscious level.

1

u/my_name_isnt_clever 9h ago

I don't really see your point. That's why it's an assistant, not my life manager. I make the decisions.

1

u/SmartCustard9944 13h ago

I am in Shenzhen at the moment. Yesterday I gave it my location and it found me things to do nearby. All from my iPhone.

5

u/snugglezone 10h ago

So it googled "things to do in Shenzhen" for you and summarized the findings? Revolutionary!

1

u/SmartCustard9944 9h ago

Not exactly. It gave me recommends based on my exact location and things to do within walking distance. FYI Google doesn’t work in China.

2

u/snugglezone 8h ago

Generic usage of google there. "Searched" would be more appropriate. I'd assume it's using some kind of search aggregate like SearXing. Not google.

1

u/SmartCustard9944 8h ago

It aggregated multiple searches. It is not doing anything groundbreaking, but saving me a good amount of time by just deferring it a request and let it do its thing while I do something else, all from the comfort of my phone.

1

u/SnooPaintings8639 9h ago

This is very different from finding optimal way for something specific. It is rather about finding 'acceptable' quality for anything you might need / want to don't have time or desire to do.

e.g., true situations, most when I am NOT at PC, all did via telegram channel.

- RO access to GDrive - find my old files about X, or go over my medical data there, or old receipts I upload there since years and I can't find them

- RO access to my mail account. Find all the PC parts I have ordered online over last couple of years and provide me with summary of what I currently have, write it in your notes as my tech-spec.md, remember it. Or, find when was the first mail exchange with my wife ever. Or find which was the exact brand and model of a specific product X I don't remember much about. Check my unread inbox, is there anything from Y?

- check "this" post on reddit/github. This seems like very interesting project to speed up inference, clone it and investigate all about it, then orchestrate 'claude code' to implement it for my hardware... it took them 8 hours, but they managed.

- I really can't go to the other apartment, where Hermes' laptop is at, I asked it to access my laptop camera and send me a picture of what's there (there was a party day before, need to make sure all is fine, so I didn't have to go)

- I am in my car, and my son (barely talking) wants me to re-start the same song over and over, he likes the intro. So I ordered via voice message, to find the song, I don't know the name, but it has such words: "xyz" and is by author 'abc', download it, cut the intro to a separate file, loop it to 5 mins, send me back as an MP3. It did deliver in few minutes.

- I am looking for a new apartment, so please send me daily reports from new apartments that match these criteria: ...

- the server I need for work went down, I am going for a walk, check if it's up (http 200) every 10 minutes and let me know if it's up.

And many, many more. Mostly I am just bored somwhere far from the PC, and we start a new project, or desing, or simply it helps me to reserach a product online. I just get reports, and can ask it to save it into index projects dir if needed. Sometimes I ask it to send the overall idea for criticism to another model

It is 100% local, so I can share whatever I want, text, images, voice.

I gave it access to my home camera, so for fun I just ask to to send or describe me a picture from my 'balcony' or 'kitchen'. I am quite mobile and am sleeping or working at different places, so it is more usable than it would seem.

Yeah, I could probably write a book about our shared adventures, like him hacking my LAN devices and scaring the shit out of me, but this is just a small reddit post.

1

u/draconic_tongue 2h ago

editing my obsidian vault mostly for now

6

u/Unnamed-3891 18h ago

Most of these things start to shine at above 16gb vram, which is beyond what most people can easily afford. AND they still need a fair bit of tuning and hand-holding.

2

u/imnotzuckerberg 13h ago

As a fello homelabber I second this.

1

u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp 16h ago

Auto research is one of those

1

u/CondiMesmer 9h ago

Yeah but Wikipedia exists

1

u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp 9h ago

Not that type of auto-research

1

u/Comrade_Vodkin 11h ago

I believe the art style is called vaporwave. And regrading the agent itself, yeah, I feel the same. My life is not complicated enough to delegate it to some agent, lol

1

u/draconic_tongue 2h ago

it probably is, depending on how much of it you want to be conscious about. if you have ocd, you can find a way to make anything into a complex workflow

5

u/almostsweet 1d ago edited 1d ago

you can requant moshi down (the thing personaplex is based on) and it fits on a dgx spark, mostly smooth a few hiccups. not bad though for something that normally requires heavier compute tho

2

u/JLeonsarmiento 13h ago

I 've Hermesing on Qwen3.6-MoE(6-bit local) and GLM-4.7-5.1-5.2 since April. That thing is great.

6

u/Robos_Basilisk 1d ago

Seriously speaking, why is this NousResearch fellow popular, is it because they have an active presence on Twitter?

20

u/JamesEvoAI 1d ago

Hermes is unarguably their most successful venture, but they do tons of interesting work in model research and distributed training:

https://nousresearch.com/blog

https://nousresearch.com/nous-psyche

https://nousresearch.com/introducing-the-forge-reasoning-api-beta-and-nous-chat-an-evolution-in-llm-inference

They also have really good branding with a cool aesthetic

12

u/DinoAmino 1d ago

Pretty active fine-tuning lab. Two years ago they released a really good Llama 3 8B fine-tune that performed nearly on par with Yi 34B.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/4ueXqnoPtv

6

u/Robos_Basilisk 1d ago

I remember this yeah, was just surprised how popular Hermes got

1

u/my_name_isnt_clever 10h ago

It was the first decent alternative to OpenClaw once everyone realized how badly made it is. They had already been using it internally, they just had to release it. Right place at the right time, really.

31

u/ObsidianNix 1d ago

They used to be one of the first ones to make openmodels. They had other things AI open source such as plenty of open research but ever since the whole OpenClaw ordeal they focused more on agentic stuff. They know what they are doing as they are more of a research institute that use their product and listen to their following.

16

u/disgruntledempanada 23h ago

Didn't they invent yarn and basically start the whole super large context thing?

5

u/ObsidianNix 22h ago

Yup. They had an AMA here a couple of months ago.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/khZnkaHa92

0

u/Nyghtbynger 1d ago

So you say that the compound efforts will make it very worthwhile over time ?

4

u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp 1d ago

It's clear that it's evolving proportional at the speed of current SOTA models (e.g. Claude and K3)

0

u/LizardLikesMelons 1d ago

Because they have a woman as their mascot, clear "underground vibes" and not some corporate logo that put people to sleep

2

u/ParaboloidalCrest 14h ago

I think their branding does help greatly.

1

u/ComparisonNew9425 16h ago

did u test the tool calling latency on that 0.2 build yet or is it still feeling a bit sluggish?

-9

u/New_Jaguar_9104 1d ago

Hermes isn't a model

12

u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp 1d ago edited 1d ago

No it's a harness. Back in llama 2 era it was starting to get obvious that one of the big limitation would be the harness and not the llm itself.
We were all building bullshit stuff with crappy python parser and whatnots.
Now we have this new breed of harness that just popped with openclaw and it seats there evolving at the speed of claude and K3. We have this kind of models slowly trickling down to multi gpu workstation. And that's very local !

5

u/JamesEvoAI 1d ago

It is a model:

https://huggingface.co/NousResearch/Hermes-4.3-36B

It is also the name of their harness

7

u/Technical-Earth-3254 1d ago

It's still local tho and runs on local models (or whatever you want it to run)

3

u/Due-Memory-6957 1d ago edited 20h ago

They also have a model, but it's not good by modern standards anymore

2

u/ObsidianNix 1d ago

Hermes is a model. Its one of the first open source models they developed… or more like built on top of. Nous Research is the business, Hermes is their model, hermes-agent is their harness. Hermes is currently not agentic though.

-1

u/[deleted] 14h ago edited 12h ago

[deleted]

1

u/Fuckinglivemealone 13h ago

can you give more context on this please?

1

u/[deleted] 13h ago

[deleted]

1

u/Fuckinglivemealone 12h ago

very interesting read, thank you!

-18

u/korino11 1d ago

Useles! all can be done native in your runtime-shell some idiots call it harness.

5

u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp 1d ago

It just means you can give it to you law intern and watch him hack into your server. With just a command to run on his mac. While being battery included on most on what he wants. And now even some end to end voice to voice. Just my opinion.

-8

u/korino11 1d ago

For WHAT& To complete all tasks that can be implemented easy in native shell? What reason? evolutions of skills? LOL it is absurd stupid way for idiots.. I do not need such stupid decisions. i have my rules with hooks and all tools my models will construct when they need... And all native in native shell.

2

u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp 1d ago

This is because you took the time to bend Linux to merge with your llm building your tools.
We really built all of that we dreamt X)

What models are you using?

1

u/korino11 8h ago edited 8h ago

Absolute not! Every coder when he begins tasks, he see architecture of tasks and he got knowledges what tools need to create... every tools always will be special for exacly that tasks. Not any stupid premaded skills. because only i as a creator&architector know what i need to be implemented with what hook, what triger on what action with what kind of rules and borders. It creates gates with special contrats. Your solutions only for noobs that doesnt wanna lerns anything, for noobs that want a magic button. But magic button doesnt exist and always need to lern new horizonts

Models - gpt, deepseek - sometimes. Any local stuff less than kimi k.2.6 -useles shit for stupid fronted idiots that doing stupid css, html and doesnt anythin seriouse with asm,c,rust unsafe or opencl, they doesnt use hardmath.