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teknium1 1b8a1c7d5e fix: handle multimodal content in context compression summarization
The _generate_summary() method assumed message content is always a
string (msg.get('content') or ''). When content is a multimodal list
(e.g. [{type: 'text', text: '...'}, {type: 'image_url', ...}]), this
produced mangled output: len() returned the list length instead of
character count, and slicing produced list items instead of substrings.

Add _content_to_text() helper that safely converts any content format
to plain text:
- str → returned as-is
- None → empty string
- list (multimodal) → text parts joined, images replaced with [image]
- dict/other → JSON serialization with str() fallback

This ensures multimodal conversations compress correctly instead of
producing garbled summaries.

Inspired by PR #776 by @kshitijk4poor.
2026-03-11 05:42:31 -07:00
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README.md

Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent ⚕

Documentation Discord License: MIT Built by Nous Research

The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. It's the only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions. Run it on a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure that costs nearly nothing when idle. It's not tied to your laptop — talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM.

Use any model you want — Nous Portal, OpenRouter (200+ models), z.ai/GLM, Kimi/Moonshot, MiniMax, OpenAI, or your own endpoint. Switch with hermes model — no code changes, no lock-in.

A real terminal interfaceFull TUI with multiline editing, slash-command autocomplete, conversation history, interrupt-and-redirect, and streaming tool output.
Lives where you doTelegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and CLI — all from a single gateway process. Voice memo transcription, cross-platform conversation continuity.
A closed learning loopAgent-curated memory with periodic nudges. Autonomous skill creation after complex tasks. Skills self-improve during use. FTS5 session search with LLM summarization for cross-session recall. Honcho dialectic user modeling. Compatible with the agentskills.io open standard.
Scheduled automationsBuilt-in cron scheduler with delivery to any platform. Daily reports, nightly backups, weekly audits — all in natural language, running unattended.
Delegates and parallelizesSpawn isolated subagents for parallel workstreams. Write Python scripts that call tools via RPC, collapsing multi-step pipelines into zero-context-cost turns.
Runs anywhere, not just your laptopSix terminal backends — local, Docker, SSH, Daytona, Singularity, and Modal. Daytona and Modal offer serverless persistence — your agent's environment hibernates when idle and wakes on demand, costing nearly nothing between sessions. Run it on a $5 VPS or a GPU cluster.
Research-readyBatch trajectory generation, Atropos RL environments, trajectory compression for training the next generation of tool-calling models.

Quick Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Works on Linux, macOS, and WSL2. The installer handles everything — Python, Node.js, dependencies, and the hermes command. No prerequisites except git.

Windows: Native Windows is not supported. Please install WSL2 and run the command above.

After installation:

source ~/.bashrc    # reload shell (or: source ~/.zshrc)
hermes setup        # configure your LLM provider
hermes              # start chatting!

Getting Started

hermes              # Interactive CLI — start a conversation
hermes model        # Switch provider or model
hermes setup        # Re-run the setup wizard
hermes gateway      # Start the messaging gateway (Telegram, Discord, etc.)
hermes update       # Update to the latest version
hermes doctor       # Diagnose any issues

📖 Full documentation →


Documentation

All documentation lives at hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs:

Section What's Covered
Quickstart Install → setup → first conversation in 2 minutes
CLI Usage Commands, keybindings, personalities, sessions
Configuration Config file, providers, models, all options
Messaging Gateway Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Home Assistant
Security Command approval, DM pairing, container isolation
Tools & Toolsets 40+ tools, toolset system, terminal backends
Skills System Procedural memory, Skills Hub, creating skills
Memory Persistent memory, user profiles, best practices
MCP Integration Connect any MCP server for extended capabilities
Cron Scheduling Scheduled tasks with platform delivery
Context Files Project context that shapes every conversation
Architecture Project structure, agent loop, key classes
Contributing Development setup, PR process, code style
CLI Reference All commands and flags
Environment Variables Complete env var reference

Contributing

We welcome contributions! See the Contributing Guide for development setup, code style, and PR process.

Quick start for contributors:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent.git
cd hermes-agent
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
uv venv .venv --python 3.11
source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -e ".[all,dev]"
uv pip install -e "./mini-swe-agent"
python -m pytest tests/ -q

Community


License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Built by Nous Research.