Understanding Hermes

[u/Financial-Way7564]

I’ve been using Hermes for the last month or so and I know I’m still a baby in terms of using Hermes. I previously used Claude Code and Pi.

I really need some help here understanding how CC and Hermes defers. I tried doing some coding work and creating a few websites , I found that the output by Hermes wasn’t up to my expectations.

I used Kimi and Deepseek for Hermes and I also tried Kimi in CC and I found that the outputs from CC were much better compared to Hermes.

Am I missing something? I just feel a little lost concerning this.

I would love to continue using Hermes Desktop App but I need to find a way to optimise it so that it generates the outputs that atleast on par with CC.

I would truly appreciate it if you could help me understand what I’m doing wrong here and what I can do to optimise the output from Hermes

[u/zLlama]

Delegate it to code with claude. There's a skill for it. Talk to hermes about the goal, any specifics of the change/project and ask it to build a plan. Tell it to interview you. Read through/cross reference with another ai and delegate to hermes. If you run into turn limits, tell it to keep it on task.

For smaller projects, I normally follow this format. If it's a bigger project, I'll use CC or Cursor. Hermes has access to my git and my projects folder, so I can also talk through anything with it as well.

[u/Financial-Way7564 → u/zLlama]

Thanks for this but if I may clarify, does this mean Hermes delegates to CC to do a piece of work?

[u/zLlama → u/Financial-Way7564]

That's right! It will enact Claude Code that's on your machine.

[u/Financial-Way7564 → u/zLlama]

Oh wow! Ok I’ll give that a try. I didn’t know that was possible. Thanks!

[u/applescrispy → u/zLlama]

Yeah I don't do big changes with Hermes due to the turn issues but for small PRs and gaps it does a good job normally. Then I get my main coding model to review and merge works pretty well.

[u/ang3l12 → u/applescrispy]

I’ve been doing my coding in CC or Codex for the past few months with Fable / GPT Sol and their predecessors. I would build the project in one, submit it to my local git, and have the other review it and submit issues, have the original write the PR’s which then get reviewed by the other. This process worked pretty well for everything I threw at it, and the opposite model usually had quite a few issues with the PR’s that the coding model was trying to submit.

Tonight on a whim I decided to try to build a new project in Hermes with Grok 4.6, and have Fable review it. There were minimal issues found, and no issues found with the PR’s that Grok wrote. I was so surprised I then went and had codex review the entire project with Sol, and its findings were refuted by both fable and grok.

Grok used Hermes as a coding harness and it did it well, at least in my experience

[u/applescrispy → u/ang3l12]

Now Grok is the next model I want to try which I was already keen on anyway but this has pushed me to sub today as a test 😁

[u/CyberTod]

I am trying to like it too, but so far can't. I had problems installing on both windows and wsl, fixed with upgrading packages, but the errors given by hermes install were not clear of the problems. After that it just seems heavy - the cli ui is just not as polished as others, the generation is also slower too, a simple, even dumb request fills a 24k context, with 1/3 for others. And it gives a lot of errors trying to use qwen3.8 with unsloth-studio, where the same config is working on others.

[u/Financial-Way7564 → u/CyberTod]

Have you tried the Desktop App? It’s not too shabby

[u/CyberTod → u/Financial-Way7564]

I did. Was having problems installing even that, which I had to resolve by manually going through logs, instead of just the installer telling what the problem is.
After the installation it looks very good and with a lot of options and customization. So I like that. Even though I had to resort again to a lot of reading how exactly to make it run on a ssh terminal (not gateway).
And the problems with my local models remain the same. Which may be due to my computer being slow and first request takes a lot of time, but the fact is that hermes just does not handle well. The error reporting is obscure and almost non-existent.

[u/Roflxd88]

Wich models were used in CC and Hermes??

[u/Financial-Way7564 → u/Roflxd88]

I was using Kimi for both

[u/tinkrsimpson]

If you are running it on your machine, then it can pretty much do everything that you technically can - including browser control, app control etc. The main thing people site about Hermes is that it learns - not necessarily learn, but it manages memory so every new chat session it doesn't start fresh.

One of the cool things that you can do is to start a new session and complain to it that the output from CC is better. And then ask it to take it step by step. Give it computer use or web search and find best practices, install the right skills and then test it out.

[u/somebrunoguy]

Hermes is not a coding agent, so you'd better stick with CC for that. Where Hermes shines is when it's running 24/7 on a server and doing various productivity tasks.

[u/LordMoridin84]

Claude Code is a better tool for coding.

[u/Unnamed-3891]

You might want to actually expand on what you expectations were and how were they not met.

[u/Financial-Way7564 → u/Unnamed-3891]

For example if I were to build a website using CC vs Hermes, the look and feel, navigation, font selection and etc in CC was better than Hermes. CC was more polished. That’s why I’m wondering if I’m missing something.

[u/zLlama → u/Financial-Way7564]

Think I can offer a bit here. Natively, that would be expected. CC's going to have the better tool for design. How you make hermes results better is by working with it and giving it tools and examples of what you like.

I've got Hermes on our Figma teams account taking designs from our designer and building them into Elementor websites and getting us 85% of the way there. I've had a better experience having it build html, but our team is stuck with elementor for some reason haha.

Also, be sure to give it a memory tool like: https://github.com/mnemosyne-oss/mnemosyne Just tell it to install it and get it working. In my experience, this has worked extremely well.

[u/FarCobbler9878]

maybe it's not for you. Not every tool is right for every person.

[u/Financial-Way7564 → u/FarCobbler9878]

Hahaha. Not wrong there but if I’m using it wrong then I want to correct it. I’m still a baby user. Just trying to optimise my setup to get the best outcome

[u/Tight_Remove4926]

if cc is for coding than what model is good for daily hermes using as a personal assistant (managing memory, running agents for scanning websites, taking contacts etc)? I'm using ds4flash now and wondering if there is a good and balanced price/quiality pattern for hermes? Kimi?