Install guides / Hermes Agent

Install your agent in Hermes

In Hermes each agent is a profile: its own personality, memory, skills, model and chat apps, kept separate from your other agents.

File What it does
SOUL.md Personality, job and the rules it always follows. Hermes loads this in every chat.
memories/USER.md Who you are. Fill this in. Hermes reads it from the profile's memories folder.
skills/kitmyagent/ Its skills. Hermes keeps skills in category folders, and this kit uses one called kitmyagent.

Install as a new profile (recommended)

  1. Create the profile (lowercase letters and numbers only): hermes profile create ava
  2. Copy SOUL.md from the kit's hermes/ folder into ~/.hermes/profiles/ava/, replacing the one Hermes made.
  3. Copy the kit's memories/USER.md into ~/.hermes/profiles/ava/memories/. Then open it and fill in your details.
  4. Copy the kit's skills/kitmyagent/ folder into ~/.hermes/profiles/ava/skills/.
  5. Pick its model, using any provider you've set up (Ollama, OpenAI Codex, Anthropic…): hermes --profile ava model
  6. Choose what it's allowed to do. New profiles start with most tools switched on (web, browser, terminal and any email you've connected). Turn off anything this agent doesn't need: hermes --profile ava tools
  7. Connect a chat app. Create a new Telegram bot with @BotFather (one bot per profile; two profiles can't share a bot token), then run: hermes --profile ava setup gateway
  8. Restart the gateway: hermes gateway restart

Or: change an existing profile's personality

Back up the profile folder, replace its SOUL.md with the kit's version, and copy in skills/kitmyagent/. Keep its own memories/ (that's where its memory and your details live). Then run hermes gateway restart.

Telegram picture (optional, any time later)

Message @BotFather, send /setuserpic, choose your bot and send avatar/avatar-512.png.

Test it

  • Chat to the bot: "Who are you and what are your rules?" It should answer with its name and quote its rules.
  • Ask: "What's my name?" It should know it from USER.md.
  • Ask it to email someone. It should show a draft and wait for you to say "send it". If you test real sending, send to yourself.
  • hermes --profile ava skills list should show the kit's skills.