meraGPT

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.

Hermes Agent chat tab in the browser, showing a tool call to execute_code

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.

Sessions tab in Hermes Agent showing a list of past conversations

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).

Models tab in Hermes Agent showing configured providers

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.

Config tab in Hermes Agent

Talking to your agent from Telegram (or Slack, Discord, etc.)

Hermes ships with messaging gateways for Telegram, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp and Signal. The gateway service is already running on your box — you don’t SSH in, and you don’t need to run any hermes gateway command. Everything happens in the dashboard.

The fastest one to wire up is Telegram. Three steps:

  1. In Telegram, open @BotFather and send /newbot. Pick a name and a username (must end in bot). BotFather replies with a token like 1234567890:AAH.... Copy it.
  2. Still in Telegram, open @userinfobot. It replies with your numeric user ID (e.g. 549267219). This is the “session ID” or “chat ID” the upstream Hermes docs mention — you don’t need shell access to find it.
  3. In your meraGPT dashboard, click KEYS in the sidebar, then the MESSAGING sub-tab. Paste the token into TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN and your user ID into TELEGRAM_ALLOWED_USERS. Hit Set on each.
Hermes dashboard KEYS → MESSAGING tab with Telegram bot token and allowed users fields populated

Finally, click Restart Gateway at the bottom of the sidebar. Gateway Status should flip to Running within a few seconds. Send any message to your bot in Telegram and you’ll get a streaming reply. The Sessions view in the dashboard will show Telegram under Connected Platforms with a green Connected badge.

Sessions view showing Telegram connected

Slack, Discord, WhatsApp and Signal follow the same pattern: the keys live in the same MESSAGING sub-tab, you set them, you restart the gateway. The official Hermes docs cover the platform-specific token formats.

Updating Hermes

The Update Hermes button at the bottom of the sidebar pulls the latest version of the agent onto your box. We pin a known-good build by default; you can use this button when you want a newer one (for example, after a fix lands upstream). It starts immediately when you click — no separate confirm step — and a streaming log appears at the top of the dashboard while the update runs. Your skills, memory, sessions and keys all survive the update.

Update Hermes streaming log panel during an in-progress update

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