using your agent
A tour of the Hermes dashboard
Once your box is up and your key is pasted in, this is the surface you’ll actually live in. Here’s a quick rundown of the tabs, in roughly the order most people use them.
Chat
Where you talk to the agent. Type a prompt, press Enter, Hermes streams a response and runs tools when it needs to. The right rail shows tool calls as they happen: code execution, file reads, web fetches. You can see what the agent actually did to answer.
Handy slash commands inside chat:
/model <name>: switch model mid-conversation./clear: start a fresh session (Hermes asks to confirm)./help: full list of commands./backup: dump your memories, skills and sessions to a zip you can download.
Sessions
Every conversation is a saved session you can scroll back through. No time limit, no “upgrade for history”. The box is yours, so the storage is too. Hermes also picks up cross-session context through its memory layer, so it remembers things you told it last week without you having to repaste.
Models
Pick the default model for new sessions and see which providers are configured. Useful when you want to flip between a fast, cheap model for routine chat (Gemini Flash Lite, Claude Haiku) and a stronger one for harder work (Claude Sonnet, GPT-5).
Skills
Hermes is “self-improving” in the sense that it can promote a useful answer or a working procedure into a reusable skill. Next time you ask something similar, it picks the skill up automatically. This is the biggest reason people stay on Hermes specifically: it gets better at you over time. The official docs cover the skill format in detail.
Cron
Schedule recurring tasks like “every morning at 8, summarise my inbox” or “every Sunday, check these prices”. Hermes runs them in the background; results land in a session you can review. This is the part that genuinely needs an always-on box. You can’t do it from a chat tab on your laptop.
Config
Provider preferences, default tool choices, voice on/off, theme, and a couple of dashboard knobs. The Gateway rows at the bottom are for messaging gateways (Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, Signal) so you can chat with your agent from any messaging app. The Hermes docs cover the setup for each one.
Documentation
The Hermes Agent docs are also embedded right in the dashboard, so you don’t have to switch tabs to look up a command or a skill format. A good place to keep open while you’re learning the slash commands.
Going deeper
- Use cases: concrete things people set Hermes to do.
- The official Hermes docs cover the skill format, hooks, MCP and memory internals.