How-To Series · Episode 23 / 59 · Module 4: Eyes, Ears, Voice

Hermes · Image Generation

Nine models. Cheap drafts to studio polish. Pick once, persist forever.

After this videoYou can now generate images at the speed and price that fit the job.

Hermes calls FAL.ai under the hood and saves a PNG to disk. Nine models with different speed, quality, and price tradeoffs. Two setup paths: Nous Portal (Tool Gateway, no FAL key) or your own FAL_KEY. hermes tools is the picker — one column-aligned table, arrow keys + Enter, selection persists in config.yaml. The workflow that saves money: iterate cheap on Klein 9B (~$0.006/MP, sub-second) for drafts, then re-run the winning prompt on a premium model (Nano Banana Pro, Recraft V4 Pro, Flux 2 Pro) for the keeper. GPT-Image models are pinned to medium quality so Portal billing stays predictable.

About these resources. Every command in this video comes from the Image Generation doc; the Tool Gateway doc is cited for the no-keys path.

Sources · What this video distills

2 docs pages · every command below traces to one of them
Primary · nine models, comparison table, two setup paths, picker, persistence
Image Generation
Read ↗
Portal-managed image gen with no FAL key
Tool Gateway
Read ↗

Commands shown · Copy and paste

each shows the source doc it came from
Portal pathfrom source ↗
hermes setup --portal && hermes tools
FAL key pathfrom source ↗
echo "FAL_KEY=fal-..." >> ~/.hermes/.env
Switch modelfrom source ↗
hermes tools

Going deeper · Related Hermes docs

further reading · not sources of facts shown above
Vision
the input side of multimodal
TTS
the audio output side

Next in the series · Episodes that build on this

E22
Vision · Images
E11
Tools & Toolsets
E53
Tool Gateway