Hermes Co-Founder on Building an AI Agent That Improves Itself | Karan Malhotra

How Hermes keeps your context portable across models, builds and cleans up its own skills, and helped Karan modify his childhood Sonic game

Hermes Co-Founder on Building an AI Agent That Improves Itself | Karan Malhotra

TL;DR

  • Hermes is the #1 personal agent and AI app on OpenRouter, developed by Nous Research.
  • The article emphasizes the importance of open-source AI and how Hermes gets better with usage.
  • Karan demonstrates how he used Hermes to modify his childhood game, Sonic Adventure 2.
  • The 'personal' aspect of an AI agent comes from its memory of conversations and built skills, not the model itself.
  • Users can customize Hermes' 'soul.md' file to define its personality, core truths, and boundaries.
  • The partnership with Linear allows for agent edits to documents and project descriptions with version history.
  • The discussion covers differences between Hermes and other AI models, the debate on AI safety in open vs. closed-source, and using AI agents with Kanban boards.