Hermes Agent, Nous Research's self-improving local AI agent, just shipped a new setup option called Blank Slate mode. It is a small but meaningful quality-of-life addition for anyone who wants to build a custom agent configuration from scratch rather than accepting the tool's opinionated defaults.
Quick recap: what Hermes Agent actually is
Hermes Agent is the self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. It claims to be the only agent with a built-in learning loop: it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions.
It is an open-source alternative to OpenClaw (Claude Code) by Nous Research, the lab behind the Hermes model family. After launch, it became very popular, getting over 30K stars -- and as of now the GitHub repo sits at 197K stars and nearly 35K forks, making it one of the fastest-growing agent frameworks around.
The framework is model-agnostic. You can switch between providers like Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, and Anthropic, or connect to a local model through Ollama, by running the hermes model command. One Nous Portal subscription covers 300+ models plus the Tool Gateway (web search, image generation, TTS, cloud browser).
Three ways to set up, now including a blank canvas
Until now, Hermes offered two setup modes when you ran
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