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Is Lobster a Thing of the Past? Unpacking the Hermes Agent Tools that Supercharge Your Throughput to 100x
On February 25, a team called Nous Research quietly pushed a v0.1.0 to GitHub. Initially, the Hermes model had only a one-line installation command and a one-liner product positioning: "An agent that grows with you."
At that time, few people paid attention to it, even though Nous Research had a certain reputation in the model circle, and their Hermes series models had already accumulated 33 million downloads on HuggingFace. However, the entire developer community's attention was focused on the revered OpenClaw "Lobster." Surpassing React in just 33 days, the "Lobster" became the fastest-growing project in stars in GitHub history, with a peak of 710 stars per hour. However, it was at this time that a security researcher continued to disclose vulnerabilities at an average rate of 2.2 CVEs per day during the same time window, accumulating 138 security vulnerabilities in 63 days. The entire community began to rethink a question: Can this thing really be used in a production environment?
Against this backdrop, Hermes Agent, as a competitor, finally found an opportunity and ushered in its first period of rapid growth.
Hermes embedded a tool in its code for one-click migration from OpenClaw. The developers who left OpenClaw needed a place to land, and Hermes Agent became a widely recommended choice.
So, starting from early March, Hermes Agent stormed into GitHub Trending, reaching as high as 11th place with over 2200 stars. AwesomeAgents dubbed it the "most ambitious open-source Agent release to date." Currently, Hermes' GitHub has 69.9k Stars and 9k Forks.
Today, Rhythm BlcokBeats will talk to everyone about what sets this Agent apart.
What is Hermes Agent?
Hermes Agent is a self-evolving AI agent built by Nous Research and is currently the only Agent with a built-in learning loop.
It can automatically create skills from usage experience, continuously improve these skills during use, proactively solidify knowledge into reusable assets, retrieve its own past conversation history, and deepen its understanding of you as a user through multiple sessions.
So, in simple terms, the biggest advantage of the Hermes Agent is: the more you use it, the smarter and more convenient it becomes.
Its positioning is not a programming assistant embedded in an IDE, nor a chat wrapper for a single API, but a truly self-resident agent on your server that can remember what it has learned, with its capabilities growing stronger over time.
Nous Research has positioned itself from the start as an open-source-first, decentralized AI lab with the goal of building user-controlled AI, rather than concentrating intelligence in the hands of a few closed companies. Their early work focused on the Hermes model series, with significant investments in infrastructure and system-level work. They also explored DisTrO technology for model training using globally distributed consumer-grade GPUs, as well as simulation environments for multi-agent interactions and long-term behaviors like WorldSim and Doomscroll.
The Hermes Agent team is the same group of people behind the Nomos and Psyche model series.
What are the useful tools?
The core mechanism of the Hermes Agent is its memory system and skill system. The Agent maintains two concise core files: MEMORY.md stores environment information, conventions, and summarized experiences from past tasks; USER.md stores your preferences and communication style. These two files are automatically injected into the system prompts at the beginning of each session, acting as the Agent's "long-term working memory." Additionally, all historical sessions are stored in an SQLite full-text search database, allowing the Agent to retrieve conversations from weeks ago.
Regarding the skill system, each time a complex task is completed (usually more than 5 tool calls), the Agent autonomously creates a structured Markdown "skill document," recording operation steps, known content, and verification methods for future reuse. The skill files follow a progressive disclosure pattern: the Agent defaults to only viewing the skill name and description (about 3000 tokens), loading the full content of a skill only when needed to control token consumption.
On the tooling side, the Hermes Agent comes with built-in support for over 40 tools, covering tasks such as web scraping, browser automation, computer vision, image generation, text-to-speech, and even natural language scheduling for automation tasks like report generation, data backups, system monitoring, and more.
Among these tools, the most popular ones—those most frequently used by the community, with high feedback and alignment with Hermes' architecture and developer community needs—are:
Hindsight is currently the most popular standalone tool in the ecosystem, serving as Hermes' recommended long-term memory plugin. It automatically recalls relevant contextual information before each long-lasting memory (LLM) call, supports local PostgreSQL or cloud deployment, and has been natively integrated as the Memory Provider within Hermes.
Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills is the ecosystem's top-starred skill set, featuring 753+ structured cybersecurity skills that map directly to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, making it suitable for security research and penetration testing scenarios.
mission-control is the most popular agent orchestration dashboard in the ecosystem, supporting agent fleet management, task distribution, cost tracking, and multi-agent collaborative workflows, highly recommended by the community as the standard for production deployments.
Hermes Agent Self-Evolution is an evolutionary self-improvement technology that uses DSPy + GEPA to optimize skills, suggestions, and code.
Hermes Workspace is the native workspace within Hermes, integrating a chat interface, terminal, and skill manager, serving as the most popular graphical entry point.
Furthermore, it can spawn individual child agents, each with its own conversation context, independent terminal, and Python RPC scripts, enabling zero-context-switching cost parallel pipelines.
In terms of infrastructure flexibility, it supports six terminal backends: local, Docker, SSH remote, Daytona serverless, Singularity container, and Modal cloud functions. Daytona and Modal go to sleep when idle, incurring minimal costs. You can run it on a $5 VPS or GPU cluster, issue commands via Telegram, and have it work on cloud servers where you never directly SSH into.
The Hermes Agent currently has the most direct competitive relationship with OpenClaw, both of which are open-source Agent frameworks for developers.
Their architectural philosophies are vastly different: OpenClaw's core design is a "control plane," a unified long-running process responsible for managing sessions, routing, tool execution, and state, with everything flowing through this central controller. Hermes, on the other hand, places the Agent's own execution loop at its core, building around this "do, learn, improve" iterative cycle with components like gateways, a job scheduler, and a tool runtime.
The difference in their skill systems is particularly significant: OpenClaw's skills are mostly manually authored, loaded from different levels such as workspace, personal, shared, or plugins; Hermes, on the other hand, aims for the Agent to generate skills from experience, forming a true autonomous learning loop.
How to Install and Use
Getting started is extremely simple. With a single command "curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash," you can complete the installation. It supports Linux, macOS, and WSL2. The Hermes Agent will automatically handle all configurations without manual intervention.
Hermes Website
Once the Hermes Agent installation is complete, run "hermes setup" to start the setup wizard. Choose your model provider (supporting Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, or any custom endpoint), connect to your messaging platform (Telegram, Discord, Slack, or WhatsApp), and then begin your first conversation. From the first interaction, the Hermes Agent immediately enters learning mode, starting to build memory, create skills, and become more capable after each session.
Core commands for daily use include:
hermes (start a conversation),
hermes model (select an LLM provider and model),
hermes tools (configure which tools are enabled),
hermes gateway (start message gateway, integrating with platforms such as Telegram, Discord),
hermes setup (run full setup wizard, configuring all content in one go),
hermes claw migrate (migrate from OpenClaw),
hermes update (update to the latest version),
hermes doctor (diagnose issues);
The Hermes Agent is suitable for scenarios such as: a general AI assistant that needs to remember context across sessions and continuously improve; a custom Agent workflow that combines tools, plugins, MCP servers, browsers, or shells; deploying the Agent on local hardware, cloud VMs, or low-cost serverless infrastructure; and scenarios that require a persistent assistant to maintain searchable conversation history and learned skills across platforms.
More specifically, it can be used to have a conversation with it on Telegram while having it perform tasks on a cloud VM, set up automation and push reports to any platform, or have it take over periodic tasks; integrate it into Slack or Discord to provide AI collaboration support for the entire team; or utilize its trace export feature to generate training data for RL training of the next-generation tool-calling model.
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The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.
There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."
No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.
In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.
X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.
This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.
The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.
The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.
After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."
From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.
In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.
As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."
Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.
For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.
This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.
There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."
X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.
In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.
WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.
X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.
This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.
X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.
Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.
The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.
X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.
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Soaring 50 times, with an FDV exceeding 10 billion USD, why RaveDAO?
1 billion DOTs were minted out of thin air, but the hacker only made 230,000 dollars
After the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, when will the war end?
Before using Musk's "Western WeChat" X Chat, you need to understand these three questions
The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.
There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."
No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.
In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.
X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.
This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.
The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.
The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.
After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."
From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.
In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.
As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."
Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.
For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.
This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.
There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."
X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.
In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.
WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.
X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.
This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.
X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.
Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.
The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.
X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.
The help page sentence has never been just technical instructions.
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