Installer Hermes Agent sur un VPS Hostinger : tutoriel, analyse et points de vigilance

Vidéo du jour. Ce tutoriel de Metics Media montre comment installer Hermes Agent sur un VPS Hostinger, le connecter à Telegram et poser les bases d’un agent personnel capable d’exécuter des tâches, de mémoriser des préférences et de lancer des automatisations.

Voir la vidéo sur YouTube : Hermes Agent Hostinger Tutorial: Install and Setup Hermes on a VPS

En 30 secondes

  • Sujet : déployer Hermes Agent sur un VPS Hostinger puis le relier à Telegram.
  • Public : débutants, curieux de l’IA agentique, profils semi-tech qui veulent un agent autonome sans tout installer à la main.
  • Niveau : accessible, avec une logique pas à pas.
  • Ce que la vidéo fait bien : elle montre un chemin concret, sans jargon excessif, depuis l’achat du VPS jusqu’aux premiers usages utiles.
  • Sa limite principale : elle simplifie forcément ce qui relève de la maintenance, de la sécurité et du passage d’un test à un usage durable.

Fiche express

Élément Détail
Titre Hermes Agent Hostinger Tutorial: Install and Setup Hermes on a VPS
Chaîne Metics Media
Date 2026-06-03
Catégorie Education
Type de contenu Tutoriel d’installation guidée
Verdict Kikiby Une bonne porte d’entrée pour comprendre l’installation d’Hermes Agent et ses usages de base, avec un angle très orienté débutant.

Pourquoi cette vidéo mérite l’attention

La plupart des contenus sur les agents IA tombent dans l’un de ces deux pièges : soit ils restent théoriques, soit ils montrent une démo rapide sans expliquer l’infrastructure derrière. Ici, la vidéo prend le temps de dérouler un scénario complet. On part du VPS, on passe par le setup, puis on arrive à des usages concrets : conversation Telegram, skills, mémoire et cron jobs. Pour un lecteur de Kikiby, l’intérêt est simple : on voit comment un agent IA quitte le stade de gadget pour devenir un outil personnel installé sur sa propre machine.

Résumé

Matt présente Hermes Agent comme un agent IA open source capable de vivre sur son propre serveur, de dialoguer via des applications de messagerie et d’apprendre progressivement à partir des habitudes de son utilisateur. La démonstration s’appuie sur un VPS Hostinger préconfiguré pour simplifier l’entrée de jeu. Le tutoriel enchaîne ensuite les étapes essentielles : choix du plan, accès au terminal, lancement de hermes setup, configuration d’OpenRouter, connexion à Telegram, mise en route de la gateway, puis premiers exemples d’usage autour de la recherche web, des skills et de l’automatisation. La vidéo se termine sur deux sujets importants : le suivi des coûts et les garde-fous de sécurité de base.

Ce que la vidéo montre vraiment

1. Le positionnement d’Hermes Agent

Le message d’ouverture est clair : Hermes n’est pas présenté comme un simple chatbot, mais comme un agent personnel capable de fonctionner en continu, de conserver de la mémoire et de réutiliser des workflows. C’est un angle important, parce qu’il explique tout le reste : le choix d’un VPS, la connexion à Telegram et l’intérêt des tâches planifiées.

2. Un parcours d’installation très balisé

La vidéo réduit la friction au maximum en s’appuyant sur une offre Hostinger où Hermes est déjà préconfiguré. C’est très efficace pour débuter. En revanche, ce confort masque une partie de la complexité réelle qu’on retrouverait avec un déploiement plus manuel ou sur une autre infrastructure.

3. La couche modèle et API

Le passage par OpenRouter est bien amené. L’idée n’est pas seulement de brancher une clé API, mais de montrer que le choix du fournisseur et du modèle influence directement le coût et la qualité des tâches. La recommandation d’un modèle peu coûteux mais fiable pour commencer est cohérente dans une logique de prise en main.

4. Le vrai point d’usage : Telegram

La connexion du bot Telegram est probablement la partie la plus parlante pour un public non technique. C’est à ce moment que l’agent cesse d’être une installation abstraite dans un terminal pour devenir un outil que l’on peut interroger depuis son téléphone. C’est aussi l’un des meilleurs leviers pédagogiques de la vidéo.

5. Ce qui donne envie d’aller plus loin

La partie sur les skills, la mémoire et les cron jobs est celle qui donne la meilleure idée du potentiel du produit. On comprend que l’intérêt d’Hermes n’est pas seulement de répondre à des questions, mais de capitaliser sur les tâches récurrentes, d’automatiser de la veille et de renvoyer des résultats de manière autonome.

Analyse Kikiby

Cette vidéo fonctionne bien parce qu’elle ne vend pas seulement une technologie. Elle vend un scénario d’usage crédible. Installer un agent sur un VPS, le relier à Telegram, lui faire exécuter une recherche, sauvegarder cette méthode comme skill, puis planifier la tâche chaque semaine : la chaîne logique est bonne. Elle donne au spectateur une vision très concrète de ce que peut devenir un agent personnel.

Là où il faut nuancer, c’est sur la simplicité perçue. Oui, le tutoriel est accessible. Oui, il donne l’impression qu’un débutant peut réussir. Mais cette accessibilité repose en partie sur un environnement déjà préparé et sur des choix guidés. Dès qu’on sort de ce chemin balisé, les questions de diagnostic, de maintenance, de sécurité, de monitoring ou de qualité des modèles reviennent assez vite.

Autre point intéressant : la vidéo insiste beaucoup sur l’autonomie de l’agent. C’est juste, mais il faut rappeler qu’un agent n’est utile que si ses workflows sont bien pensés. L’autonomie n’est pas magique. Elle dépend des outils disponibles, de la qualité des prompts, de la fiabilité des intégrations et du niveau de contrôle que l’utilisateur garde sur les sorties.

Points forts

  • Pédagogie claire : le parcours est progressif et rassurant pour un débutant.
  • Bon séquençage : chaque bloc prépare le suivant, sans grand saut logique.
  • Cas d’usage concrets : la vidéo ne s’arrête pas à l’installation et montre de vrais usages.
  • Bonne mise en scène de Telegram : c’est le point qui rend Hermes immédiatement tangible.
  • Introduction utile à la notion de skills et de mémoire : on comprend vite pourquoi Hermes se distingue d’un chatbot classique.

Limites et points de vigilance

  • Dépendance au contexte Hostinger : le tutoriel est plus simple parce qu’il s’appuie sur une offre déjà pensée pour Hermes.
  • Maintenance sous-estimée : la vidéo parle peu des mises à jour, du suivi long terme ou des incidents d’exploitation.
  • Sécurité survolée : les bases sont évoquées, mais pas les pratiques plus avancées.
  • Vision très orientée débutant : c’est une force, mais aussi une limite pour un lecteur qui veut comparer plusieurs architectures de déploiement.

Promesses vs réalité

Promesse perçue Ce qu’il faut comprendre en pratique
Installer Hermes est simple Oui dans ce parcours précis, parce que l’environnement est en partie préparé.
On peut avoir un agent autonome rapidement Oui pour une première boucle fonctionnelle, mais l’utilité réelle dépend ensuite des workflows construits.
Le coût reste faible Possible, à condition de surveiller le modèle choisi, la fréquence d’usage et les automatisations lancées.
Pas besoin de savoir coder Vrai pour démarrer. Moins vrai dès qu’il faut dépanner, personnaliser ou étendre sérieusement le système.

Comment passer à l’action ?

Si cette vidéo vous intéresse, la bonne approche n’est pas de vouloir tout automatiser d’un coup. Commencez par un usage simple : connexion à Telegram, une tâche de recherche ou de synthèse, puis une automatisation hebdomadaire. C’est généralement suffisant pour juger si Hermes peut devenir un vrai outil de travail dans votre cas.

  • Prévoir un budget minimal pour le VPS et pour l’API modèle.
  • Choisir un premier workflow concret, pas une ambition trop large.
  • Vérifier les accès et les garde-fous de sécurité dès le départ.
  • Observer les coûts avant de multiplier les jobs planifiés.

Citations marquantes

“If you’ve been looking for a clear step-by-step guide to setting up Hermes Agent on a Hostinger VPS, you’re in the right place.”

Cette phrase pose exactement la promesse du contenu : un tutoriel guidé, plus orienté exécution que discours.

“Unlike a regular chatbot, it runs on its own all the time, remembers how you work, and writes its own skills as you go.”

C’est probablement la meilleure synthèse marketing d’Hermes dans la vidéo. Elle est parlante, mais elle mérite d’être replacée dans la réalité : ces capacités dépendent toujours de la qualité des workflows que l’on met en place.

“You don’t need any coding experience to follow along, just the ability to copy and paste.”

Le message est efficace pour dédramatiser l’entrée. Il faut simplement garder en tête qu’entre réussir une première installation et maîtriser durablement l’outil, il y a un vrai écart.

Chapitres de la vidéo

  • Présentation d’Hermes Agent et de la promesse générale.
  • Choix du plan VPS Hostinger et justification du dimensionnement.
  • Accès au terminal et entrée dans le conteneur Hermes.
  • Lancement de hermes setup et choix du provider / modèle.
  • Création du bot Telegram et autorisation des comptes.
  • Démarrage de la gateway Hermes.
  • Premier échange avec l’agent depuis Telegram.
  • Découverte des skills, de la mémoire et des tâches planifiées.
  • Suivi des coûts côté OpenRouter et Hostinger.

FAQ

Faut-il savoir coder pour suivre cette vidéo ?

Pas vraiment pour la démonstration elle-même. En revanche, un minimum d’aisance avec un terminal reste utile dès qu’il faut sortir du cadre prévu.

Pourquoi Telegram est-il central dans ce tutoriel ?

Parce qu’il transforme l’agent en outil quotidien. Une fois la gateway active, Hermes devient accessible depuis le téléphone, ce qui rend son usage beaucoup plus concret.

Le coût peut-il rester raisonnable ?

Oui, si l’on choisit un modèle peu coûteux pour démarrer et si l’on surveille l’activité des automatisations. Sans cela, la facture peut vite grimper.

À qui cette vidéo sera-t-elle la plus utile ?

Aux débutants qui veulent une première installation guidée d’un agent IA personnel, sans devoir tout assembler eux-mêmes dès le départ.

Ressources utiles

Transcription

La transcription complète ci-dessous a été récupérée via le webhook n8n, puis segmentée pour rester lisible dans la page.

If you've been looking for a clear step-by-step guide to setting up Hermes Agent on a Hostinger VPS, you're in the right place. My name is Matt, and in this video, we're going to get your agent running, connect it to Telegram so you can message it from your phone, give it skills it can use again and again, and schedule jobs so it can do things for you on its own, even while you sleep. We'll also cover what it actually costs to keep running and how to make sure no one else can talk to it. Quick context if you're new to Hermes. It's a free, open-source AI agent made by a team called Nous Research. Think of it as a personal version of ChatGPT or Claude that lives on your own server, talks to you through chat apps you already use, and gets a little better the more you use it. Unlike a regular chatbot, it runs on its own all the time, remembers how you work, and writes its own skills as you go.

You don't need any coding experience to follow along, just the ability to copy and paste. Now, the first thing we need is the server itself, so let me show you how to get that set up. The first link in the description opens a page that has Hermes Agent already preselected for automatic installations, so we don't have to set that up manually. The link also stacks an extra 10% discount on top of whatever sale Hostinger is currently running, which makes this the cheapest way to get a working Hermes Agent online anytime. So go ahead and use the link on screen or click the first link in the description below. When you click that link, you'll land on this page here, and if you click the "Choose plan" button, that'll take you down to see the pricing options. You'll see a few VPS plans listed side by side. We are going to pick KVM 2.

It comes with two CPU cores, eight gigabytes of memory, and 100 gigabytes of storage. I wanna be straight with you about why we're not picking the cheapest plan. Later in this video, we're going to give the agent skills that let it browse the web, and the agent already runs inside a Docker container on Hostinger for safety. Both of these use real resources. The smaller plan can technically run Hermes, but it can't run all of that at the same time without slowing down or freezing up. KVM 2 also happens to be the plan that Hostinger themselves recommend for Hermes. So go ahead and click "Choose plan" on the KVM 2 option> You'll be taken to the cart page, and the first thing you wanna do is select the period for your registration. You can choose one month, 12 months, or 24 months, and you generally get the best value, the lowest per-month price overall, if you select 24 months.

But if that's too much for you for getting started, totally understand; I recommend then selecting the 12-month option. That's the lowest term they'll let you select and still take advantage of our coupon. If you select one month, they don't let you use that extra 10% discount. Next, you can see that they already have the "Hermes Agent auto deploy" set up for this particular option, so that's great. Last, you wanna choose your server location. You generally wanna pick a server location closest to you or whatever has the lowest latency. Here, I'll select one of these United States Boston options, which gets me only eight milliseconds of latency, which is fantastic. If you wanna protect your setup, you could also turn on daily auto backups. By default, you get weekly auto backups. For me, that's just fine, but if you wanna make sure that everything's protected, you can turn that on.

Whenever you're ready, go ahead and click "Continue." On the next page, go ahead and register your account. On the next page, enter your billing address and your payment information to complete the checkout. And I wanna point out that there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so anytime in the next 30 days, if you have any issues, you can just reach out to Hostinger and get your money back. When you complete the checkout, you'll get this confirmation. Next, Hostinger drops you onto a short setup form. Now we just need to choose the admin credentials for the Hermes web terminal and let the server build itself. By default, they populate the admin username as Hermes, which works just fine, and they give you a custom-generated secure password. Now click on the eye icon to reveal the auto-generated password.

I'm showing mine here because I'm going to delete this account later, but definitely make sure that you don't share this with anyone. This is how you access your agent. Go ahead and copy this username and password and save it somewhere safe. Then simply click "Deploy." Hostinger is now building your server and installing Hermes on it. This takes a few minutes, so I'll go ahead and fast-forward to when it's complete. When it finishes, you'll be routed into the Hostinger dashboard, and you might be presented with a survey. You can fill it out if you want or simply click "Skip." There is also maybe a pop-up or two, and you can simply dismiss them. Welcome to Hostinger's Docker Manager. You can see here that your Hermes Agent is already running in a new Docker project, and it has Traefik set up as a reverse proxy to make sure that you can access your agent from anywhere on the web securely.

Now we need to open a window into the server so that we can talk to Hermes directly. We're going to use what's called a terminal. That's the text-only window where you type commands. Hostinger has one built right into the browser, so we don't need to instal anything extra on your computer. To open it, you'll simply click the "Terminal" button in the upper right, but before you do that, go ahead and copy the last four letters here from your Docker project name here. So it should say "hermes-agent-" and then have four letters. Go ahead and select and then copy those four letters. All right, now go ahead and open the terminal. A new tab will open with a black terminal window, and you're already signed in. Now, if you've never used a terminal before, it can look a little bit scary or overwhelming. It feels a bit old school or even kind of hackery, right? But really, it's simple.

It instead of clicking around with folders and icons to interact with a computer, instead you're simply typing text, kind of like interacting with the chatbot, but you need to enter very precise commands. You can't just type whatever you want. So first, what we're going to do is make sure that we have a flashing cursor here, and if this isn't flashing, go ahead and click on your terminal screen, and it should get that going. Next, we're going to type "cd /docker/hermes-agent-" and then go ahead and paste in your four characters that you copied earlier, and then hit "Enter" or "Return" on your keyboard. We just did that because when you first land on the terminal, any commands you type are going to the VPS at the high level, almost like the desktop on your computer.

To send any commands to your Hermes Agent application specifically, we have to tell the terminal to access that programme first, so that's what we just did. Now we need to access the Hermes container. To do this, type "docker compose exec," spelled E-X-E-C, " -it hermes-agent /bin/bash" and hit "Enter." All right, now we're going to activate the setup wizard. To do this, type "hermes setup." Then press "Enter." This starts the setup wizard. It's a questionnaire that agent runs the first time it boots. It asks which AI provider you want to use, which model you want by default, and which messaging app you want to talk to it through. We'll answer each question together. To start, the wizard will ask if you want a quick or full setup. We'll go ahead and just do the quick setup.

It's already selected here, so all you have to do is hit "Enter." The first thing the wizard asks is which AI provider you want to use. A provider is the company that runs the actual AI model the agent uses to think. There are over 20 options here. We're going to use one called OpenRouter because it gives you access to many different models with a single account and a single bill. That means you can switch between AI models later without signing up anywhere else. In the wizard here, use the arrow keys on your keyboard, up and down, to highlight "OpenRouter" and then press "Enter." The wizard now asks for your OpenRouter API key. Leave the screen open in the terminal; we'll come back to it in a minute. Go ahead and open up a new browser tab and go to OpenRouter.ai. You can type that in manually or use the link in the description of the video below.

This here is OpenRouter, and it's the platform that allows us to access a bunch of different AI models in one place. Now the wizard is asking for what's called an API key. An API key is a long secret string that tells OpenRouter that requests are coming from you. Hermes uses the key to call the AI model, and OpenRouter charges your account for what gets used. Treat the key like a password, don't share it with anyone. On this site here, go ahead and click "Sign Up" in the upper right. Then follow the steps to create account or sign in. If you're signing up for the first time, you'll need to verify your email. Go ahead and open your inbox and click the link. Here's what that email looks like. Should be something like this. The subject will say, "Your sign up link," and then there'll be a button inside that says, "Sign up to OpenRouter." Go ahead and click that.

On the page that opens, you'll get a survey. Go ahead and select an option, and then click "Continue," and you should get a confirmation. Next up, we'll need to add credits to our account. We need just a small amount to get started, so let's go ahead and click "Buy Credits" and then "Add Credits." Go ahead and add your billing information, and then add a payment method. After you've got your payment method added, we'll need to add an amount to start with. It defaults to $10, which is plenty for us to get started. So go ahead and click "Purchase," and you'll get this little confirmation. You can just click "OK." When the transaction completes, you'll see that your account balance has been added to. Great, now we have credit. Next, we need to get our key. On the left side, click "API Keys." Then, in the upper right, click "New Key." You'll need to give your key a name.

We can call it something like Hermes Agent. Now, you can set a credit limit here if you wanna make sure that your account has a hard cap. For example, you could set a limit for $20 and then have that reset every day, every week, or every month. I'll set mine to monthly. And you can set that to expire at a certain date or leave it alone. Now, this is a cost guardrail. This is great, so it makes sure that you're never spending more than you wanna spend. Now you do have to add credits, so this mostly works as a guardrail for if you have more credit on your account and you wanna manage how it gets used over time. For example, if you've got 100 credits on your account and you only wanna spend 20 a month, this is how you can manage that. You can leave this blank if you don't want to have that limit.

Either way, set it up the way you'd like and then click "Create." Now here you'll see a long string starting with "sk." This is your API key. Again, it's like a password. Don't share it with anyone. Go ahead and copy it and save it somewhere safe because you will not be able to see this again. If you close this window without copying it, you'll need to start over and create a new key, so just make sure you copy it before you do anything else. All right, go ahead and switch back to your terminal tab, then click into the terminal and paste in your API key. Now, I wanna point out here, you won't actually see anything happen once you paste it in. This is just for security reasons so that anybody who's watching can't see private information being entered into your terminal, but it is in there.

So once you've pasted that in, go ahead and hit "Enter" on your keyboard, and you'll see the API key has been saved. Next, the wizard asks which AI model you want Hermes to use by default. A model is the specific AI brain the agent will use to think. Different models have different strengths and different prices. Some are very smart but expensive, some are cheap but not great at the kind of structured work an agent does. For a beginner setup, I recommend DeepSeek V4. That's this one right here. It's cheap, about 43 cents per million words in and 87 cents per million words out, and it's reliable at the kind of multi-step work that Hermes does. You won't get a surprise large bill on day one. Now, a quick tip: not every model on OpenRouter works well as an agent.

Two to avoid for now are GPT-5.4 mini, which struggles with the tool calls that Hermes needs, and the reasoning versions of Qwen 3.x with thinking tags turned on. Those tend to talk themselves out of using tools. You can change the model later with a single command. I'll show you how to do this, so don't worry about this too much upfront. We're picking DeepSeek because it's both cheap and reasonably powerful. To select it in the list, use your arrow keys until it's selected and then hit "Enter" on your keyboard. Next, it'll ask where you wanna have your terminal backend. We're just going to keep the "current local," so go ahead and hit "Enter" on your keyboard, and now it'll ask if you wanna connect a messaging platform. So go ahead and hit "Enter" on your keyboard to set up messaging. Now you can connect Hermes to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, and a few others.

We're going to use Telegram because it's free, it's fastest to set up, and it works on every phone and computer. To connect Hermes to Telegram, we need to create something called a Telegram bot. A bot is a Telegram account that's controlled by software instead of a person. Hermes will use the bot to send and receive your messages. All right, so first in this wizard, type "1" in your terminal to select Telegram and hit "Enter." It'll ask you to hit "Enter" to confirm again, so go ahead and hit "Enter," and now it asks for that Telegram bot token. All right, leave the terminal where it is for now and switch to Telegram. You can use Telegram on your phone or your computer. If you don't have Telegram yet, I have a link in the description below where you can download it. So download it on your preferred device. In my case, I'm going to run it on the computer here.

And then sign up or sign into your account. Once you've got Telegram open, go ahead to the search bar and look for BotFather, or you can click the link in the description below to open a chat directly with the BotFather. It's the one here with this blue verified check mark. Go ahead and click that one, and then click "Start." You can either type the command "/newbot" or click it from the message. You'll get a response from the BotFather saying, "What are we going to call the bot?" So I'll call mine MattHermesBot. Now we need to choose a username for your bot, and the bot name must be unique in the Telegram ecosystem, so try to pick something that's not just generic. Otherwise, you might have to retry a few times as you find a username that is unique. I'll call mine MattHermesWonderBot, and we get a confirmation saying the bot's been created. That message contains this long string here.

This is your token to access the HTTP API. This is what Hermes is asking for, so go ahead and copy this. Now, go ahead and switch back to your terminal tab, then click in and paste it again. You're not going to see this being pasted in. Just go ahead and press "Enter" on your keyboard, and the wizard will confirm the token and move on. Next, the wizard asks which Telegram accounts are allowed to talk to your agent. This is important. Without this step, anyone on the internet who finds your bot's username could message it and use up your AI credits. We need to tell Hermes that only your Telegram account is allowed. To do that, we need your personal Telegram user ID. Telegram has a bot that gives you yours in about 10 seconds. Head back to Telegram and then search for "userinfobot." It's this one right here with the green profile and the ID for a face.

Then tap "Start." The bot replies with your details. Go ahead and copy your ID. Switch back to the terminal, paste in your ID, and hit "Enter." Next, the wizard asks if you want this ID set as your home channel. That's where Hermes will send scheduled job results and any messages it sends on its own. Press "Y" on your keyboard for yes, and then press "Enter" on your keyboard. And setup is complete. The wizard now shows you a summary of everything that it's set up, your tool availability, where your settings are stored, and a list of helpful commands. Next, we'll want to launch the Hermes chat interface. To do this, type "hermes" and hit "Enter." All right, and the chat interface opens inside your terminal. You'll see your model, your tools, and your installed skills listed at the top. Now we start what's called the gateway.

The gateway is the part of Hermes that listens for messages from Telegram and passes them to the agent. Once it's running, you can close the terminal and talk to your agent right from your phone. In the terminal at the bottom here, where you have the cursor, type "hermes gateway instal" and press "Enter." This wires Telegram into the gateway. It can take a few moments, so just wait until it completes. Next, type "hermes gateway run" and hit "Enter." Again, this can take a few minutes. Now we hit a permission error because we're running as root user and the gateway wants to run as the Hermes user for safety. Notice that the agent itself diagnosed the problem and gave me three ways to fix it. The simplest one is the first one: run the gateway as the Hermes user. So that's what I'll do.

And you can simply copy the command here from the output, highlight it, hit "Command + C", and then paste it into your terminal. Or for some reason, it doesn't give you the version that you can just copy-paste, here's what that command is: "sudo -u hermes /opt/hermes /.venv/bin/hermes gateway run." I know that's a lot, but that's why it's easier to just copy and paste and hit "Enter" to run it again. This will take a second to process. And now we have a confirmation saying the gateway is up and running. The gateway is live. Okay, let's send the agent its first message from Telegram, open Telegram and search for the username you gave your bot, or go back to your conversation with the BotFather and click on the Telegram link directly to your bot. Then click "Start," and you may get this message saying "Unknown command." That's normal.

Hermes doesn't use a built-in "/start" command, so it's just letting you know. Now, we'll send a real first message. Let's type: "You're running on a Hostinger VPS inside Docker. Tell me what tools and skills you currently have available," and submit it. We're doing this to give the agent its initial context so it knows where exactly it's running, and you can see here that it's typing. Really, this means that it's thinking and it's just letting you know. It'll come back with a response in a minute. And we got a reply. It's a pretty long one. It's a list of all the different skills and everything that our agent has access to. Now, if you got a reply, your agent is working. That's the hard part done. If you didn't get a reply, don't worry. The three things that most often go wrong are an API key that didn't paste cleanly, a missing user ID in the allow list, or the gateway not starting properly.

The quickest way to find out is to return to your terminal and type "hermes doctor" and submit it. It'll check your setup and point at what's wrong, and if that doesn't catch it, run "hermes setup" again and walk through the wizard. All right. From here, we're going to make the agent do real work for you. The two things that make Hermes more than a regular chatbot are skills and memory. A skill is a saved workflow the agent can run on its own. Some come built in, others get created when you ask the agent to do something complex. The agent saves the steps so it can run the same workflow again without thinking it through from scratch. Memory is how the agent keeps track of things about you across separate conversations. I wanna show you something that makes setting up your own agent worth the effort.

The agent is going to do real research for you on the open web, save what it found to a file on your server, then automate the same job to run on a schedule. Now I make YouTube videos, so for me, I wanna have my bot research the top five YouTube videos ranking right now for something like email marketing and then present me with a report, but you can have your own bot research whatever you'd like. So think about that now, and then I'll show you a prompt you can run that you can modify to make it work better for your situation. Here, I've typed: "Find the top five YouTube videos ranking right now for email marketing tutorial for beginners. For each one, save the title, channel, and what it covers to a file.

Then tell me which gaps you noticed." We'll go ahead and hit send, and it decides to use the skill "youtube-content." It notices that it doesn't have Chrome installed yet, so it's going to set it up for itself, and you'll see its thinking output as it's working. The agent will spend a minute or two doing the research. Just let it work, and when it's done, it'll reply with a summary in the chat and confirm where the file is saved. Now, if for some reason your agent doesn't have access to the tools it needs to run the task you've asked of it, it'll tell you and present you with options for what you can do together to make it so that it actually can do the job you've asked. For me, after a few minutes, it comes back and says where it saved the file here. "/opt/data/email-marketing-top-five-youtube.md" MD is just a Markdown file. It's just a text file. So here's the summary.

It came back with five different YouTube videos, one from Alex Hormozi, HubSpot Marketing. Oh, and I guess my video here on the Metics Media channel is number three, so that's pretty cool, I guess. There's number four and number five: Jade Beason and Life Marketing. It identified some big gaps of things that need to be covered in future videos, if anyone were to make a video, and it highlights all the different things, why it matters, bottom line, and asked if we want any further follow-up steps. So let's pause on what the agent just did. It went out on the open web, opened five different pages, pulled the same structured information out of each one, made a judgement call about what topics they're all covering and what they're missing, and saved everything to a file on the server.

The file is now sitting on your own server, not in someone else's cloud sandbox, not behind a connector to a third-party service. On the machine you control. It'll still be there the next time you talk to Hermes, even in a completely different conversation. And in a minute, we're going to set the agent up to do this same research on its own on a schedule, so the file builds up week over week, without you doing anything? Now, let's save that whole workflow as a skill so the agent can run the same research on any topic without you having to type the long prompt again. So now we'll say, "Save that workflow as a skill called competitor-watch. From now on, when I give you a search term, find the top five YouTube videos, save the same info to the file, and call out the gaps." We'll go ahead and submit that. All right, the agent confirms it saved the skill and tells us what the skill does.

It lists the trigger, says, "You give me any search term. For example, SEO tips for SaaS, and I'll follow these steps here." There's four steps, and it includes a reusable script, a Python script. That's super cool. Now, one thing worth knowing about skills: when the agent writes a skill from your own work, like we just did, it's safe by default, but if you ever instal a skill that someone else wrote, Hermes will scan it for unsafe code first, and you should still only instal skills from sources you trust. All right, last piece: memory. The agent can save things about you and pull them into every future task. Let's give it a real preference that's going to shape how this research workflow actually works for you. You can tell your bot whatever you want about you, but for me, here's what I'll say: "Remember that I make YouTube tutorial videos about software, mostly for complete beginners.

When you analyse gaps in competitor research, frame them in terms of what would help a complete beginner specifically." We'll go ahead and send that, and it confirms that it saved that preference. Now let's check its memory. Let's send it: "What do you remember about me?" And the agent will reply with what it has stored, including the niche description. It says that I'm Matt; I make YouTube videos. It needs to frame the competitor gap analysis around beginner-specific needs, and it even goes on to include details about the fact that this is Hermes Agent running on a Hostinger VPS, we're using Telegram, et cetera, et cetera. So now that preference is saved for every future conversation. The next time the agent does this research, it'll already know the additional context you provided. In my case, it'll know who I make videos for, and the gap analysis will be framed around what beginners need.

The longer you have Hermes, the more of this it builds up. The more context, the more knowledge, and the less you have to repeat yourself. One of the best features of Hermes is that it can do work for you on a schedule, not just when you ask. These are called scheduled jobs, or cron jobs. The agent runs the job at the time you pick, even if you're asleep, even if your laptop's off, and sends you the result on Telegram. You don't need to write any code or schedule syntax. You just tell the agent in plain language what you want and when you want it. Let's automate the research flow we just set up. In Telegram, we can say something like, "Every Monday at 9:00 a.m., run my competitor-watch skill on three search terms: email marketing tutorial for beginners, WordPress tutorial for beginners, and SEO tutorial for beginners.

Send me a summary on Telegram with the gaps that stood out." Now, of course, modify the research task or the scheduled task to be whatever it is you want done on a schedule. This is just my particular use case. The agent confirms the schedule and tells you when the job will run next. It may ask you to confirm your time zone. You can answer with yours. For example, I can say, "Let's use US Central Time," and we see that it was updated to run every Monday at 9:00 a.m. Central. The time zone's been saved, so other future jobs will default to it. To see all your scheduled jobs, you can simply ask. You can say something like, "Show me my scheduled jobs," and the agent will list them with their runtime. Right now, it's just this "Monday Morning Competitor Watch." Now, if you wanna see a sample of what that full output looks like, you can also ask the bot to run a job anytime.

So we could say something like, "Run that full job now," and it kicks off the cron job. This is a great way to review the output of the job to make sure you're getting everything in the right format and the way you want it presented. If it doesn't come back the way you want, you can simply tell the bot, and it'll make the adjustments for the next time. Let's take a second here to acknowledge what we just set up. Every Monday at 9:00 a.m., this agent is going to research three topics on its own. Save the findings to a file on the server and push a summary to Telegram, all on the AI model that was picked earlier, DeepSeek, and that file is going to grow week over week, so you're going to start to get a really robust research picture. You can stack as many of these jobs as you want too. You could get a morning brief, a weekly report, a price check on something you're watching.

Anything you can describe in a sentence, the agent can schedule. All right, there are two places to keep an eye on what all this cost you. First, your OpenRouter activity page for AI usage, and your Hostinger dashboard for the server itself. Back in OpenRouter on your API keys page, you can see the usage so far for that specific key. You can also click "Activity" on the left side under "Account" and see your current spend, number of requests, and total number of tokens used, and it breaks it up by hour in the day. By default, you can also change it to different time periods. So you can really get a good sense for what kinds of activities and requests are costing a lot of money. Your AI model is the single biggest lever on your bill, DeepSeek V4, the one we picked, is one of the cheaper, reliable options.

If you ever need more reasoning power for a hard task, in Telegram, send "/model" as a command to switch to a different model. From there, you can click "OpenRouter" and get a list of all the models that are available to you. If you need more power, you can step up to something like Claude Opus 4.7. Just keep in mind that more power comes with more cost. Or if you wanna step down to something cheaper, you can do that too. For me, I'll go ahead and switch us back to DeepSeek, since it's a great LLM for daily use. You can also tell the agent to use a specific model for a specific scheduled job. So your routine work stays cheap while heavier tasks get the smarter model. Now, back in the Hostinger dashboard, you can keep track of your costs by clicking on your profile in the upper right and then clicking "Billing" to see your past information as well as upcoming subscriptions and the renewal price.

That's what you'll pay when the introductory term ends. I recommend checking the OpenRouter activity page every few days while you're just getting started. That way, you can see real usage and adjust the models you use before anything surprises you. Now, the research workflow we built is just one example. Hermes can do a lot more. The easiest way to find what's useful for you is to ask the agent directly. Send it something like, "What kind of tasks are you good for?" and then let it suggest ideas. Here it comes back with a list of what it's good at. Hands-on execution, long-running background work, scheduled recurring tasks, code generation and editing, research and synthesis, and memory across sessions. It also lists some stuff it's decent at and stuff it's not built for. All right, your agent is up and learning from how you use it.

The first link in the description gets you an extra 10% off your VPS if you haven't grabbed it yet, on top of whatever sale Hostinger is already running. Thanks for watching.

Sources

Verdict Kikiby

Cette vidéo vaut le détour si vous cherchez une première porte d’entrée sérieuse vers Hermes Agent. Elle ne dit pas tout, mais elle montre l’essentiel : comment passer d’une promesse d’agent IA personnel à un premier usage vraiment concret.