What Hermes is
Hermes Agent is a free tool from Nous Research. It lets an AI model do tasks, not just chat. It can use LM Studio as its engine, so it all runs on your computer.
Hermes needs a model with a memory window of at least 64K tokens. Hermes docs.
Steps
- Set up LM Studio and download a model first. See our LM Studio guide.
- Install Hermes. On Mac or Linux, open Terminal and run the command below. Windows users can follow the install guide.
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash- In LM Studio, load your model with a context length of at least 64000.
- Open the Developer tab in LM Studio and start the server.
- In Terminal, run
hermes model. Choose LM Studio. Press Enter to keephttp://localhost:1234/v1. - Pick your model. Then run
hermesand start working.
The install command runs a script from the internet. Only run it if you trust the source. It comes from the official Hermes project.
Models that fit Hermes
These have a memory window of 64K or more, checked from their config files.
| Model | Maker | Trust | Quality | RAM needed | Business | Sign-up |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Olmo 3 7B | Ai2 | 100 | Good | 8 GB | Yes | No |
| Olmo 3.1 32B | Ai2 | 100 | Very strong | 26 GB | Yes | No |
| SmolLM3 3B | Hugging Face | 100 | Basic | 5 GB | Yes | No |
| GPT-OSS 20B | OpenAI | 84 | Very strong | 17 GB | Yes | No |
| GPT-OSS 120B | OpenAI | 84 | Top home tier | 87 GB | Yes | No |
| Qwen3.5 9B | Alibaba Qwen | 84 | Good | 9 GB | Yes | No |
| Qwen3.8 27B | Alibaba Qwen | 84 | Very strong | 23 GB | Yes | No |
| Qwen3 4B 2507 | Alibaba Qwen | 84 | Good | 5 GB | Yes | No |
| Qwen3 30B-A3B 2507 | Alibaba Qwen | 84 | Very strong | 24 GB | Yes | No |
| Qwen3 Coder 30B | Alibaba Qwen | 84 | Very strong | 24 GB | Yes | No |
| Qwen2.5 VL 7B | Alibaba Qwen | 84 | Good | 8 GB | Yes | No |
| Gemma 4 12B | 84 | Strong | 11 GB | Yes | No | |
| Gemma 4 E4B | 84 | Good | 8 GB | Yes | No | |
| DeepSeek R1 Distill 7B | DeepSeek | 84 | Good | 8 GB | Yes | No |
| DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B | DeepSeek | 84 | Strong | 13 GB | Yes | No |
| DeepSeek R1 0528 8B | DeepSeek | 84 | Good | 8 GB | Yes | No |
| Phi-4 mini | Microsoft | 84 | Basic | 5 GB | Yes | No |
| Mistral Nemo 12B | Mistral AI | 84 | Strong | 11 GB | Yes | No |
| Mistral Small 3.2 | Mistral AI | 84 | Very strong | 20 GB | Yes | No |
| Devstral Small | Mistral AI | 84 | Very strong | 19 GB | Yes | No |
| Granite 3.3 2B | IBM | 84 | Basic | 4 GB | Yes | No |
| Granite 3.3 8B | IBM | 84 | Good | 8 GB | Yes | No |
| Granite 4.0 H Tiny | IBM | 84 | Good | 8 GB | Yes | No |
| Granite 4.0 H Small | IBM | 84 | Very strong | 26 GB | Yes | No |
| GLM-4.5 Air | Z.ai | 84 | Top home tier | 82 GB | Yes | No |
| Hermes 3 8B | Nous Research | 64 | Good | 8 GB | With limits | No |
| Nemotron Nano 9B v2 | NVIDIA | 64 | Good | 9 GB | With limits | No |
| LFM2 1.2B | Liquid AI | 64 | Basic | 3 GB | With limits | No |