Hermes Agent — Agent Frameworks Platform

Hermes Agent is Nous Research's open-source autonomous AI agent with persistent memory — released February 2026 and the fastest-growing agent framework of 2026, hitting 95.6K GitHub stars in seven weeks. Unlike most agents that forget everything between sessions, Hermes maintains a curated memory of preferences, projects, environment, and lessons learned.

The memory system is layered: MEMORY.md and USER.md files live in ~/.hermes/memories/ and inject into the system prompt as a frozen snapshot at session start. On top of this, Hermes ships 8 external memory provider plugins — Honcho, OpenViking, Mem0, Hindsight, Holographic, RetainDB, ByteRover, and Supermemory — adding knowledge graphs, semantic search, automatic fact extraction, and cross-session user modeling.

Hermes also auto-generates skills: as the agent solves novel tasks, it captures the procedure as a reusable skill. Nous Research benchmarks show agents with 20+ self-created skills complete similar future tasks 40% faster (in tokens and time, not necessarily quality). The improvement is domain-specific — skills don't transfer across domains. Hermes is fully open-source and self-hostable, positioned as the agent that compounds in value the longer you use it.