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The homelab runs the NousResearch Hermes Agent as a standing, autonomous service: a self-improving agent that creates skills from experience, keeps persistent memory across sessions, and runs scheduled work on its own. This is not the Self-hosted ChatGPT serving stack — that serves a model for chat. This is an agent, and it uses a local model as its brain.

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How it runs

A dedicated LXC on the AI VLAN runs the hermes gateway daemon under systemd (Restart=on-failure). The gateway drives the built-in cron scheduler and the Kanban task board, so the agent keeps working unattended — no laptop, no cloud.
  • Brain: an always-on local GPU model (OpenAI-compatible), so the agent never depends on an external API or a sleeping laptop.
  • Memory: the built-in MEMORY.md / USER.md plus the local Hindsight provider (knowledge-graph recall, fully self-hosted). Everything lives under $HERMES_HOME on a dedicated volume that is snapshotted and replicated off-node.
  • Containment: the LXC is the blast-radius boundary — Hermes profiles isolate agent state, not OS access — with deliberately narrow egress.

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Reaching it

Headless: SSH in and run hermes for the terminal UI, or drive it through its gateway. A messaging gateway (Telegram, Discord, …) and multi-agent profiles + Kanban teams can be layered on later — the agent home is already provisioned for them.

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Configuring it

Everything is in $HERMES_HOME/config.yaml (secrets in .env), set non-interactively with hermes config set <key> <value>: 
model:
  provider: custom            # OpenAI-compatible local endpoint
  default: <model>
  base_url: 'http://<gpu-host>:11434/v1'
  api_mode: chat_completions
memory:
  provider: hindsight         # local, no external service
agent:
  max_turns: 90               # budget — caps a runaway loop
Switch models anytime with hermes model; check memory with hermes memory status. Deployment is fully IaC — a Terraform-managed container plus an Ansible hermes_agent role install and configure it, with updates managed declaratively through Ansible to prevent configuration drift.