Start with the Hermes mental model

Hermes is an autonomous agent designed to work across surfaces rather than remain tied to one editor. The official documentation describes a CLI, messaging connections, automation, memory, skills, and other capabilities that can run on a local machine, a VPS, or another supported environment.

That flexibility changes the first question you should ask: where should Hermes live for this job? Start with the smallest environment that gives the agent the tools and persistence it needs.

1. Install Hermes and confirm that the launcher works.
2. Choose one provider and model.
3. Complete one normal conversation.
4. Only then add gateways, skills, cron, memory, or routing.

This order is more than onboarding advice. It gives every later layer a known-good baseline, so a failure in automation can be separated from a failure in model setup.

Ask Hermes to inspect a small project, explain one file, and propose a safe next step. Keep the task bounded and review the output. The goal is to learn how Hermes uses context and tools before you give it a recurring or externally visible responsibility.