Intermediate AI Agents

Building Agents with Hermes

A hands-on engineering course on Nous Research's Hermes Agent: an open-source, model-agnostic agent framework with persistent cross-session memory, a skills system that writes and refines its own capabilities, and a real function-calling standard. Covers installation, wiring up model providers from Nous Portal and OpenRouter to Anthropic, OpenAI, and self-hosted vLLM or Ollama endpoints, the <tools>/<tool_call>/<tool_response> format, MCP server integration, terminal and serverless deployment backends, messaging-platform gateways, and the guardrails that keep a self-improving agent safe once it is running unattended.

25 Modules
3.8h Duration
Text + Code Format
Free Cost
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Prerequisites
  • Basic command-line comfort (installing CLIs, editing YAML/JSON config)
  • Basic Python (functions, imports, running scripts)
  • A free API key from at least one model provider, or a local Ollama install

What you'll learn

  • Install, configure, and run Hermes Agent from the CLI and TUI
  • Connect Hermes to cloud model providers (Nous Portal, OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI) and self-hosted endpoints (Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp)
  • Write and parse tool calls using the Hermes function-calling standard, and connect MCP servers
  • Understand how Hermes' memory, skills, and self-improvement loop work together across sessions
  • Deploy Hermes across terminal backends (Docker, SSH, Daytona, Modal) and messaging platforms (Telegram, Discord, Slack)
  • Apply safety guardrails, debug failures, and design multi-agent systems with Hermes in production

Course Curriculum

25 modules · 3.8 hours total

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