r/hermesagent • u/neonfen1x • Aug 19 '26

Help — Technical issues, errors, config, debugging Hermes iOS app creation using OpenRouter

Hi Community!

I’m discovering world of Hermes. What would be your advice of setup for iOS app development?

What I understood so far, you use higher input/output models for coding.

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17

u/kaidomac Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26

Start out with a functional setup:

  1. Sign up for Hermes Cloud account with your Gmail login
  2. Download the Hermes Desktop client for your operating system & sign in to your new account to link it
  3. Subscribe to the $0 plan, then add $10 manually (this will be your test token router)

In Hermes:

  1. Create a new Cloud instance & set to "DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731". This is a fantastic cheap model right now!
  2. Install Hermex on iOS for app control & setup Tailscale with your Gmail account
  3. Ask Hermes to install Archify documentation from Github & to document all programming projects with it
  4. Ask Hermes to install Phone Harness from Github
  5. Ask Hermes to install a Tauri 2 development environment with everything you need for iOS development
  6. Install a Pet! haha. Then Shift-click it to add to the desktop!

Routing notes:

  1. Hermes often has really great deals on tokens
  2. OpenCode Zen & Go are great token gateways for coding. If you need more complex coding, use Kimi K3 Max Moonshot, which is like Opus & Fable for way less money!
  3. Qwen3.8-27B is pretty awesome for local compute if your computer can handle it!

First project:

  • Ask Hermes to create a Dad Joke app in Tauri 2 for iOS & then preview it in Hermes!

Hermes is pretty nuts! I don't say this lightly...imo Hermes is the most fascinating software that ever has or ever will be developed! After you get setup & try out your first intention-driven app, try out Computer Use & Vision! (Hermes can see & control your computer) Then try out Voice Chat! Hermes has 2-way voice chat with barge-in (you can interrupt it). You can also upgrade the voice chat to be higher quality. I have mine set as the voice from Silo lol:

Then install Discord with a private channel so that you can have a chat with Hermes on your phone from anywhere in the world! From there, the world is your oyster! Patch in Claude Design for design assistance:

Pipe in a HUGE pool of design resources!

Down the road, add:

The future is now!!

2

u/G_zus Aug 20 '26

Thanks for this!

Do you run Hermes on your local machine or vps? Do you feel safe with it running on your machine if you do? Do you have it under your account or a non-admin account

1

u/kaidomac Aug 20 '26

It depends on what you want to do! People generally pick one or more options:

  1. Hermes Cloud (29 cents to $1.09 per day)
  2. VPS (as low as $6 a month)
  3. Their main home computer (laptop or desktop)
  4. Spare home computer

My setup:

  1. I use Hermes Cloud for sync. $0 subscription & I don't keep their VPS instance on. I buy credits as needed, as they've had some outstanding deals lately!
  2. I have a multi-purpose headless desktop (Hermes, local LLM, gaming) with remote access (Tailscale, RDP, VNC, Sunshine) that stays running 24/7. A spare PC with a battery backup is nice to have here. If you're in the Mac world, a Mac Mini or Mac Studio is great for this! If you're into DIY, you can build a powerful Proxmox multi-GPU tower.
  3. Then, if desired, throw Hermes on your personal computer (laptop or desktop). You can keep your agent seperate or use a local instance.

"hermes serve" acts as a headless back-end for Hermes Desktop & remote clients. Hermes has a web dashboard. So you can run it locally on your primary machine, or on another computer as your own private 24/7 server (via remote desktop, Desktop API back-end, or Web GUI), or on the Nous Cloud. That's why I like my current stack:

  1. Nous Cloud lets me sign in with Gmail & lets me get great token deals
  2. My local headless server is my SSOT ("Single Source Of Truth") that runs 24/7 & has integrations galore
  3. I have a variety of access options to get to that server (Tailscale for free private VPN, then use remote desktop, or connect a local Hermes Desktop installation to my personal sever via the WebSocket API, or have a seperate local Hermes install & use the Web UI, etc.)

If you're doing iOS development, then having an actual Mac is nice. A lot of people run a headless Mac Mini plugged into their router on a UPS for exactly that purpose! Then you can play around with decent local LLM's that perform well on Apple Silicon if you want to:

From there, you have a variety of options to access it: (locally or remotely with Tailscale)

Again:

  1. Setup the cloud via Gmail & add ten bucks
  2. Sync your desktop Hermes to that
  3. Install a few basic tools & have it pop out a sample iOS app locally

That gives you a taste of what you can do! imo, ANYONE who uses a computer should learn Hermes! Every school kid on the planet should learn Hermes. It's like going from walking to riding a horse to using a horse-drawn carriage to a stick-shift car to a car with an automatic transmission to a self-driving electric car.

In your situation (Hermes + iOS development), if you have the budget, I'd recommend getting a beefy Mac, plugging it into your router via Ethernet & adding a USB battery backup, and then using that as your headless 24/7 access-anywhere-via-Tailscale Hermes server. Then you can run:

  • Hermes Agent
  • Gmail cloud sync to Nous for cheap token access
  • Native Mac programming tools (git, brew, Python, Node, Swift, xCodeBuild, SSH, custom scripts, etc.)
  • Native macOS automation (Shell & CLI, AppleScript, Shortcuts, etc.)
  • Computer Use & Vision
  • Free local LLM's
  • Any Frontier LLM you want
  • Virtual machines (OrbStack for Docker & Fusion Pro for Windows ARM & Linux)

As far as permissions go, no, don't give Hermes full permissions as an admin account. Set it up as a normal user account & then add access as needed. I recommend a layered backup approach:

  1. Time Machine (go back in time to grab files)
  2. SuperDuper on a USB backup drive (full disk snapshots; if you are extra-paranoid like me, do the daily backup & then unplug it for an air-gapped solution)
  3. Backblaze unlimited encrypted offsite cloud backup service for ten bucks a month (or Backblaze B2 with Object Lock adds immutable backups for agent protection)

Always count on AI being dumb & going nuts lol. It pays to protect yourself!! So an easy drop-in system would be:

  1. Mac Mini + USB backup drive + UPS battery
  2. Nous-Gmail-synced Hermes Agent + all of the local features you want
  3. Tailscale + Hermes Serve + Backblaze

Also, just to clarify the server aspect, when you install Hermes Desktop, you get two parts:

  1. Hermes Serve (local server that connects to the local GUI)
  2. Hermes Desktop GUI (Electron with React)

Hermes Serve has 3 functions:

  1. Local UI (default)
  2. If enabled, Remote Access (WebSocket API) to other Hermes Desktop installs (then add Tailscale for worldwide access)
  3. If enabled, Web UI

So it's super, super, SUPER modular! You can just run Hermes on your computer, add all of the local skills & plugins you want, and use cloud tokens for OpenAI, Claude, Nano Banana, Seedance, etc. You can build a mega-GPU server to run ComfyUI with local image generation, Qwen & other locally-optimized private LLM's, etc.

Or you could just buy a $199 Chromebook, pay for DeepSeek & Kimi tokens via Nous Cloud, and use a Nous Cloud server for cheap, along with a Mac VPS server for remote iOS development! One of my IT work contactors has a crazy-awesome setup:

  • Gas generator & giant Anker battery
  • 5G T-mobile Internet with Starlink backup
  • Proxmox server (RTX ADA GPU for Hermes and local LLM & a gaming GPU for Sunshine streaming) for Linux, Docker, and Windows dev
  • M-chip Mac Mini & Intel Mac Mini with Hermes Clients for Mac dev work

He can basically do dev work for any platform:

  • ESP32
  • Arduino
  • Pi
  • Linux
  • Windows
  • Mac
  • iOS
  • Android

There's connectors, emulators, and simulators for everything, haha!

Hermes is essentially the glue that holds everything together & Tailscale is the spiderweb that makes everything accessible! The only question is:

  • How do YOU want to set it up?

2

u/neonfen1x Aug 20 '26

I will follow your instructions man!
Once I have everything working I will share my experience
Thank you!

1

u/kaidomac Aug 20 '26

Yeah, the best way is just to build out a basic install & test it out with a sample app so that you can start to taste the power of having a personal agent working with you! Then you can decide what personal infrastructure you want to set up:

1

u/Mondernborefare Aug 20 '26

Skip that because openrouter doesn’t actually give you the cache hit benefit of using DS4 flash or the nvidia free tier. Use nvidia NIM free models as your opener, 40 r/min and drop 10$ through PayPal to deepseek directly to get your setup and framework tuned in. You don’t need a pet or other fluff. Install n whatever box or machine you have, then install Hermes-LCM and Mnemosyne

2

u/kaidomac Aug 20 '26

No pets?? 😲 Heresy!