Hermes AI Agent 0.22 Just Changed Everything

Julian Goldie (0:00)

So, Hermes AI have just dropped V022, the threshold release, and Hermes AI now runs on your own computer with no account and no API key. I'll come on to that in a second, and set it up, takes one chat. News Research just released Hermes Agent version 0.22. They named it the threshold release. A threshold is the doorway you step through to get into a room, and this whole update is about making it easy for anyone to step through. Here's what it looks like. So, you can open up Hermes for the first time, and it now talks to you and it asks your name, asks what apps you use, it sets itself up.

And if you want, it can actually run a full AI model on your laptop. So nothing you type ever leaves your machine. If you've been watching about AI agents from the sidelines because they look too technical, this is for you. I'll walk you through what's new, what it means for a normal business, and the one feature that most people are going to skip past that could save you time. Let's start with the part that surprised a lot of people, which is the local model system.

So now, you get local models in one click. Now, most AI tools work like a phone call, right? So you type something in, it goes off to a big computer somewhere far away, and the answer comes back, and that's fine. But it means you need an account, you need a key, and your words leave your computer. Hermes 0.22 can now skip all of that, and it just makes it much easier to set up local models. You could already set up local models previously, but this is far easier to use now.

So basically, it installs the engine that runs the AI right on your computer, and then it looks at how much memory you have, how strong your graphics chip is, and it scores every model on its list, and then it picks the best one that your computer can actually handle, so you don't have to know any of that stuff. It's just going to figure out for you. And then the downloads can actually pause and pick up later, so the AI starts when Hermes starts and stops, and when Hermes stops, right? When there's a new version of the engine, you just update it with one click. Now, this works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and the list includes models like QWEN 3.8, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and you can load other models from HuggyFace 2, which is a big free library of free models. You might think, okay, what models can I actually run? Again, this update is designed for that. So for most people watching, you're not going to run DeepSeek locally, but you can basically figure out which local model works best for you. By the way, if you're wondering how to get the latest version of Hermes Agent, you can either go to your dashboard and update, or for example, you can go to Hermes' desktop, check for updates, click Update, and it will start doing it for you. Now, one thing to note about this update is that it's making it very accessible for people who have never used AI agents before, or struggle with technical stuff. So before this update, here's what happened when someone tried Hermes for the first time. They would download it, they would open it, it would ask for an API key. API key is just like a password you pay for, and it lets an app use an AI brain like Clawdor GPT. And to get one, you have to go to another website, make an account, add a card, copy along code, paste it into the right box, and that's where most people are going to quit, because they just don't want to mess around with API keys and everything else. So let's talk more about the first launch setup system with the new Hermes agent update. So previously, the first step felt like a lot of work, and now you just open up the desktop app on a computer that's never had Hermes, it starts to set up a chat instead of setting its card or page, one card at a time, your name, a color you like, layout which apps to connect, which plugins to add, a quick tour. So it's like an onboarding process for your AI agents when you're using them now, and it gives you a quick tour and offers up to four tasks picked for you.

Now this release also adds something called connectors.

So you can ask for an app that could be Notion, for example, Linear, which is a task tracker a lot of teams use, you sign in once in your browser, and the tools work in that same chat and you don't need to restart. You don't need a news account for this as well. So the first time you connect an app, Hermes makes a free account just for connectors behind the scenes, and you can also connect two accounts for the same app. That could be, for example, like a work one and a personal one. They sit by side, and then you just pick which one to use. This also works with your MCP servers too.