Hermes Docs Research

Hermes Docs Research

Answering "how does Hermes do X?" reliably means going to the official docs (https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs) — the source of truth, always fresher than memory or skills. This skill is the class-level procedure for mining that corpus efficiently, plus a growing references/ bank of already-verified answers.

When to use

• Any question about Hermes Agent behavior, config keys, platform setup, or desktop-app capabilities.
• Before claiming a feature does/doesn't exist — verify against the corpus first.
• Check references/ here first: a verified answer may already be banked.

Procedure

1. Check references/ in this skill for an existing verified answer.
2. Fetch the corpus (stable URLs, generated fresh on every deploy):
   • Index (~17 KB): https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/llms.txt
   • Full corpus (~3.7 MB): https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/llms-full.txt
3. Download locally, then search — the corpus is far too big for web_extract (it truncates). Use terminal:

   curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/llms-full.txt -o /tmp/hermes-docs-full.txt
   grep -in "keyword" /tmp/hermes-docs-full.txt | head -40
   sed -n 'START,ENDp' /tmp/hermes-docs-full.txt   # read context around hits
   

4. Iterate synonyms: a feature may be named differently in docs (e.g. "avatar" vs "userpic" vs "profile picture" vs "icon"). Run several greps before concluding absence.
5. Read surrounding context (±30 lines) before citing — grep hits are one-line fragments.
6. Bank durable findings: condense the verified answer into references/<topic>.md via skill_manage write_file, so the next session skips the dig.

Pitfalls

• Never web_extract the full corpus — multi-MB pages come back truncated head+tail. curl to /tmp and grep.
• Hashed asset URLs rot. Doc pages link assets as /docs/assets/files/llms-<hash>.txt and the hash changes every deploy. Use the stable /docs/llms.txt / /docs/llms-full.txt aliases, or re-derive the current hash from the landing page each time. Never reuse a hashed URL from an old session.
• False positives from third-party UI text: greps like "avatar" also match instructions about other products' UIs (e.g. "click your avatar → Admin Settings" in an Open WebUI section). Always check which doc section a hit lives in (# Heading lines are section markers; the corpus marks each page with <!-- source: ... --> comments).
• Absence of a grep hit ≠ absence of a feature — try synonyms, related terms, and the index file before concluding.
• If the bundled hermes-agent skill exists in the profile, load it first for quick orientation; the docs corpus remains the tiebreaker when they disagree.

References

• references/hermes-bot-avatars.md — where bot avatars/profile pictures are set per messaging platform (Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Google Chat, Slack) + desktop-app appearance model. Verified against docs 2026-08.