Hermes: NEW Self-Evolving Autonomous AI Agent

Hermes, the self-evolving AI agent. This is an AI agent that teaches itself new skills. It remembers every single thing you've ever told it. It gets smarter the longer you use it.

And yesterday, Noose Research announced it just hit 10,000 stars on GitHub in less than a month. So what is this AI agent, who built it, and why should you care? Well, let's get straight into that. Noose Research built Hermes.

If you don't know who they are, you need to. They're the lab behind the Hermes 3 model family. Over 50 million downloads. They raised $65 million in funding.

Paradigm led a $50 million series. Balaji Srivastava invested too. The co-founder of Solana invested. The CEO of Together AI invested.

The founder of OpenSea invested. And the company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quiznell, Karen Malhotra, and Shivani Mitra. And a guy who goes by the name Technium. Co-founder and head of post-training previously at Stability AI.

This team was building open source AI models before most people knew what a large language model was. On February the 25th, 2026, they released Hermes agent. Within days, it was trending on GitHub. By March the 12th, version 0.20 shipped 216 merged pull requests from 63 contributors.

By March the 17th, version 0.30 dropped with voice mode, a plug-in system, and 50 bug fixes. And then recently, 10,000 GitHub stars. Their most popular open source project ever. That speed of adoption tells you something.

People were waiting for this. Here's what makes Hermes different from every other AI agent out there right now. So every tool that you use today, Chachipity, Claude, Gemini, it gets you the second you close the tab. You spend 45 minutes explaining your business, your clients, how you like things done.

And then you close the window, and next time, you're starting over. It's all gone. Hermes has persistent memory. It remembers your projects, your preferences, your client names, your deadlines.

It uses something called honcho dialectic user modeling, which is a fancy way of just saying, it builds a deeper and deeper picture of who you are the more you use it. Think of it like hiring an assistant. Day one, they know nothing. After a month, they know your schedule, your tone, your processes.

That's Hermes, except it never quits. It never takes a day off. And the memory isn't even the wildest part. When Hermes solves a problem, a hard one, something that took maybe multiple steps, something complex, it writes itself a skill document.

Now, this is a permanent record of exactly how it solved that problem step by step, stored and searchable. So next time something similar comes up, it doesn't just figure it out again. It pulls up its own notes and nails it immediately. And the skills improve during use.

The agent refines its own skills the more it uses it. There's even an open marketplace called agentskills.io where people share skills with each other. The format's already been adopted by Microsoft in VS Code, by GitHub, by Cursor. So you can download skills that other people's agents have already built and perfected.

This is not a chatbot that answers questions. It's a digital worker that gets more capable every single week. Now, let me tell you where Hermes lives because this part matters. Most agents are stuck in a browser tab.

Hermes actually connects to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email, and a command line, all from one setup. You start a conversation on Telegram during your commute. Then you continue it on your laptop. And then you can pick it up on Discord that night.

The context carries across everything. And you can send it voice memos too. It then transcribes them and acts on them. Work, you know, you could be walking down the street, you record a quick note.

For example, pull last week's sales data and put together a summary for the Monday morning, and it's done. And it has a built-in cron scheduler, right? So it can schedule tasks that recur each week. You can say, for example, every Friday, compile this week's leads and format them, format CRM, and it's done.

This can also run on a $5 per month server, or you can use serverless hosting, like for example, Modal, where it hibernates when idle and costs basically nothing. Compare that to something like ChatGPT, which you might be paying like $200 a month for, ChatGPT Pro, but that still forgets your name. And I know some of you are thinking like, that sounds great, but I'm not technical. Well, right now there's actually a setup step-by-step.

So you can use, for example, a Linux server, a Mac or WSL2 on Windows, and you can just install Hermes with one command. There's actually a setup wizard that walks you through everything. So it connects to Telegram in a few clicks. But here's the bigger point.

The gap between technical and non-technical is closing every single month. A year ago, running your own AI agent sounded pretty wild. Now it's, you know, one command, and the people paying attention right now are the ones who'll be running LAPS around everyone else by the end of this year. Now, let me talk about the competition, because this is important context too.

OpenClaw launched November, 2025. It became the fastest growing GitHub repo in history. People bought dedicated Mac minis just to run it 24-7. You had other stuff like, for example, Zeroclaw.

Zeroclaw dropped mid-February as a tiny 3.4 megabyte binary that runs on $10 hardware. And then Hermes came later, right? Literally days later. And three teams, three approaches, same problem, making AI agents that work in the real world.

But Hermes has something none of them actually have, which is the self-evolution loop, the skill documents, the permanent memory. OpenClaw doesn't do that. Claw code doesn't do that. And Hermes has a one-click migration tool now for OpenClaw users.

So in one single command, you can basically import all your settings, memory skills, and API keys from OpenClaw directly into Hermes. And that just makes switching easy. Awesome Agents called Hermes the most ambitious open-source agent launch of 2026 so far. Now, here's why that matters beyond just the tech.

Every big AI company, for example, OpenAI, Google, Anthropiq, is building AI agents behind closed doors. You pay a monthly fee. Your data lives on their servers. They raise prices, change terms, shut down features, and you're stuck.

Hermes is MIT licensed and is completely free. So your data stays on your machine. There's no telemetry, there's no tracking, there's no locking, and every line of code is public. You can actually read it, modify it, fork it, and own it if you want to.

And the model flexibility is wild. So it works with OpenAI, it works with Claw, it works with three local models. You can switch them with one command, and then there's no code changes as well. Now, if a better model comes out tomorrow, for example, in terms of AI, with one command, you can just switch over to that one.

And for business owners, that's not a small detail, right? You're building on something you're actually in control of. Now, let me get practical because you're watching this to know what it means for you, right? If you run an agency, you can train Hermes on your client onboarding processes.

You can walk through it once, and then it writes itself a skilled document. And every new client after that is faster to onboard. It remembers the templates, the workflows, the follow-up, the sequences. If you're a freelancer, well, Hermes sits on your telegram, right?

So you can send a voice note between client meetings, something like draft a proposal for the Johnson project, same format as the last three. It already knows the format. If you're in e-commerce, well, you could set it to monitor competitor pricing, and then send you a Slack message every morning about what changed, automatically running whilst you sleep. And these aren't like future use cases.

This is stuff you can just do right now. And the V03.0 release from March 17th tells you how fast this project is moving. Here's what they packed in. So first of all, voice mode.

So you can do push to talk in the terminal, which means you get voice notes on telegram and discord. And discord voice channels, you got local whisper transcription as well, so your audio never leaves your machine. There's also plugin architecture as well. So you can drop in a Python file into a folder and it extends Hermes with custom tools.

No forking, just drop it in. Smart approvals too. When Hermes is about to do something risky, for example, deleting files or running a destructive command, it asks first. And over time, it learns which commands you always approve and stops asking about the safe ones.

Native anthropic providers too. So there's a direct connection to Claude without a middleman, which means that you have prompt caching built in. And then it can integrate with IDEs, VS Code, for example, or your other local IDEs, and that can connect to Hermes as an agent backend. The other interesting thing here as well is that you get persistent shell mode.

When Hermes runs commands, your directory environment variables and settings persist across everything. It sounds small, but huge in practice. And that's all in just the latest release, you know, five days after the last one. So you got 63 contributors to this open source project on 0.2.0.

The community isn't just using it, they're actually building it. And here's the thing that I think most people miss. The real power of Hermes isn't what it can do today, it's that it compounds over time, right? You could hire a new team member on day one, and they're pretty much useless, no offense.

But by month three, they're productive. By year one, they're invaluable because they know everything, your systems, your clients, your weird edge use cases, right? And Hermes does the same thing, but it never quits. It never gets pushed by a competitor and everything it learns is permanently stored in SQL documents that get better over time.

So week one, Hermes knows nothing about you. But week four, it's learned your top workflows. Week 12, it has dozens of self-written skills. And by month six, between what Hermes can do for you versus a brand new AI system is absolutely enormous.

And because it's open source, you own all of it. So let's say you switch servers. Well, you bring it with you. If News Research disappears as a company, well, your agent and everything it learned is still yours and it's on your machine.

That's a different deal than anything you get from a closed service. If you're actually sitting here thinking, I need to actually learn this stuff before it's too late. Well, number one, you're right. And that's exactly what we do inside the AI Profit Boardroom.

So we actually give you roadmaps, tutorials, step-by-step guides for using AI agents for stuff like Hermes, for example, OpenCore as well. And you can also connect with all our best community members as well. So feel free to check that out. Link in the comments description or go to the AIProfitBoardroom.com.

So where does it go from here? Hermes is less than a month old and it's already at 10,000 GitHub stars with three major releases. The v0 2.0 release had 63 contributors. The skill ecosystem agent skills IO is growing.

The plugin system just launched, which means the community can extend Hermes in ways News Research hasn't even planned for. And they haven't slowed down. If anything, they're accelerating, right? So for example, the gap between v0 2.0 and v0 3.0 was just five days, five days.

And here's what I think happens over the next six months. So AI agents become the default way people interact with AI, not chatbots, not co-pilots, agents, persistent, always on, always learning workers that live on your server and know your business better than a new hire could. And the people who start building that relationship now, who start training the agents, letting it learn their processes, accumulating those skill documents, they're gonna have a six month headstart on everyone else because this stuff compounds and you can't shortcut compound growth, right? You just have to start.

Now Hermes is free, it's open source. It actually installs with one command. It runs on a $5 server, or you can run it locally for free. And it's backed by a $65 million AI lab with some of the best open source talent in the world.

There's no excuse not to at least try it. If you're an agency, a freelancer, a creator, an e-commerce operator, and you're not paying attention to AI agents right now, you're leaving an absurd amount of leverage on the table. The tools exist, they're free, they work. The only question is whether you start now or wait until everyone else has already figured out.

And I know that sounds dramatic, but 10,000 people start this project in less than a month. They're not doing that for fun. They see what's coming, they see the future. The AI agent that remembers everything, that teaches itself new skills, that gets smarter the longer you use it, that costs less than a cup of coffee per month.

And that's Hermes. So I think we're gonna look back at this moment, March 2026, the month Hermes agent launched, and realize this is when AI agents stopped being a novelty and started being a necessity. Start now, seriously start now, and I'll see you inside the AI Profit Boarding, link in the comments description, or just go to the AIProfitBoarding.com to get roadmaps, tutorials, and weekly video coaching calls where you can set stuff like this and actually implement it inside your business.