An AI agent that autonomously edits its own skill set

What it does

Hermes is a terminal-first AI agent that chats, runs tools, and delegates work to isolated subagents. It connects to a wide range of LLM providers — from OpenAI and OpenRouter to Xiaomi MiMo and Kimi — through a single TUI or messaging gateway. The agent persists memory across sessions, autonomously creates skills after complex tasks, and runs scheduled jobs via a built-in cron scheduler.

The interesting bit

The unusual part is the closed learning loop: Hermes nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own conversation history with FTS5, and refines its skills during use rather than waiting for a human to update prompts. It also builds a dialectic user model via Honcho, so it theoretically grows a deepening model of who you are over time. That, plus the ability to hibernate on serverless backends like Modal and Daytona, makes it feel less like a chatbot and more like a long-term coworker that happens to run on a cheap VM.

Key highlights

• Model-agnostic by design: switch providers with a single command, no code changes required
• Cross-platform messaging gateway: Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and CLI from one process
• Self-curating memory: agent-managed persistence with periodic nudges, cross-session search, and LLM summarization
• Autonomous skill creation: generates and improves skills from experience, compatible with the agentskills.io standard
• Serverless-friendly: supports Modal and Daytona backends that hibernate when idle, plus Docker, SSH, and local terminals

Caveats

• Native Windows support is early beta and explicitly flagged as less road-tested than the Linux, macOS, and WSL2 paths
• The full feature set on Android/Termux requires a curated install because some voice dependencies are incompatible with the platform
• The browser-based dashboard chat pane currently requires WSL2 on Windows, even though the core CLI and gateway run natively

Verdict

Developers who want a persistent, cloud-native agent with genuine memory and skill evolution should look here; those who just need a quick, stateless chat wrapper should probably look elsewhere.