Your own AI agent, in your terminal.
Hermes is an open-source AI agent by Nous Research. Think of ChatGPT, except you own it, it runs on your own machine, and it can do real work. This is the short tour.
What Hermes actually is
Most AI you have used lives on a website and forgets you the moment you close the tab. Hermes is different. It is an agent: a program that uses an AI model to actually do things, not just talk back.
It runs in your terminal, the text window on your computer where you type commands. From there it can read and edit your files, run commands, search the web, drive a browser, remember your preferences, and message you on your phone. You point it at any AI model you like, including ones that run privately on your own machine.
And it is yours. Hermes is free and open-source. Your conversations, your memory, and your settings all live on your machine, not on someone else's server. You only pay for the AI model behind it, which can cost nothing at all if you run a local one.
What it can do
A few of the things you will set up in this series. Each one is a short, focused episode.
New to the terminal? The 30-second version
The terminal is just a window where you type a command instead of clicking a button. You do not need to be a programmer. Here is how to open it, then you paste in one install line.
That is the whole barrier. The install episode walks through it slowly, and the glossary explains any word that trips you up.
Ready? Start the series
The first two episodes take about ten minutes together and get you from curious to chatting.