Hermes Agent: the full install guide, from zero to an agent you text on Telegram
Hermes Agent is the free, open-source AI agent from Nous Research that remembers you and writes its own skills. Here is how to install it, give it a model, talk to it from Telegram, bring over what you built in Claude Code, and keep it running on a small server.
Hermes Agent is an AI agent from Nous Research that does not forget you when the chat ends. It keeps notes about you and your projects between sessions, and after a hard task it writes down how it did it as a skill, then improves that skill each time it uses it again. It is free and open source under the MIT licence, and its GitHub repository had more than 259,000 stars when this guide was written.
This guide takes you from nothing to an agent you can text from your phone: the two ways to install it, how to connect a model, how to link it to Telegram safely, how to import the memories and skills you already built in Claude Code, and how to keep it running on a small server. Every command was checked against the official documentation on 1 November 2026.
01How it works, in one minute
Most AI agents start every conversation from zero. Hermes keeps two kinds of memory, and both are plain files on your own machine that you can open, edit or delete:
It is not tied to your laptop. You can talk to it in the terminal, in a desktop app, or from a messaging app: Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal and email are all supported through one “gateway” process. It also drives a real web browser, and you can schedule jobs in plain English, such as “every morning at 8, send me the top AI news on Telegram”.
02Before you start
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