Hermes.

Hermes is the Nous Research agent, open source and MIT licensed. It is not a coding agent like the rest of this section: it lives in your messaging channels (Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email) as well as in the terminal, it remembers what you talked about, it schedules tasks for itself and it delegates to subagents.

There are two ways to have it, and the first one requires configuring nothing.

Path 1: deployed on NaN Cloud

NaN Cloud deploys Hermes for you in its own microVM, and it comes connected to the cluster out of the box: the platform injects your key and you do not have to touch any provider configuration.

This is the short way

You create the agent from the panel, pick a model, give it your Telegram bot token, and it is already talking. It is explained step by step in Agents, with screenshots.

You also get a web terminal, file uploads, logs and metrics, and you can expose it on a public URL. All of that only exists on this path.

Path 2: on your own machine

If you would rather run it yourself, Hermes ships a provider called custom, meant for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. That is the one NaN uses.

Install it

On macOS and Linux:

curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash

For macOS 12 or newer and for Windows 10 and 11 there are desktop installers on their site as well.

Configure it

hermes setup

Choose the custom provider (it also shows up as local, ollama or vllm: it is the same one, the OpenAI-compatible endpoint provider) and give it the three values:

Field	Value
Base URL	`https://api.nan.builders/v1`
API key	your key, the one that starts with `sk-`
Model	`glm5.3-flash`

Unlike the providers Hermes ships preconfigured, custom has no fixed environment variable: you give it the address and the key here, and it keeps them in ~/.hermes/config.yaml.

Check that it works

hermes doctor

It tells you whether the provider answers. Then start the agent and send it a message through whichever channel you configured.

Switching models

The default model lives in ~/.hermes/config.yaml, under model.default. You do not edit it by hand:

hermes model

Recommended model

glm5.3-flash if you are going to give it long tasks or have it delegate to subagents, for its 1M token context. deepseek-v4-flash for conversation and normal tasks, which also has the widest quota on the cluster.

If you are going to send it photos over Telegram, any of them except glm5.3, which is the only one that does not accept images.

Known issues

The two paths do not mix. The NaN Cloud Hermes is configured from the panel and yours from hermes setup. If you have both, they are two different agents with two different memories.
The custom provider does not discover models. Since there is no fixed list behind it, write the id exactly as it appears in Choose your model.
An agent that lives in your messages spends at its own pace. It is not a session you open and close: if you give it scheduled tasks, it spends quota while you are not looking. Check it at cloud.nan.builders.