Hermes as a community manager

One always-on agent in Discord, Slack and WhatsApp that answers with facts, keeps notes on members and proposes weekly shoutouts for you to approve.

CLI: hermes + gateway daemon MIT · 219k GitHub stars v0.19.0 “Quicksilver” · July 2026 any model, your own keys

Hermes is Nous Research’s open-source agent. I checked this plan against v0.19.0 from July 2026. It’s a terminal CLI plus a gateway daemon that puts one agent, with one memory and one set of skills, into Discord, Slack, WhatsApp and about twenty other platforms, group chats included. It works with any model on your own keys.

Hermes gives you the gateway, memory files, a scheduler and skill_manage, which lets the agent write its own skills. It has no per-member memory and no rewards, so you build both as skills, and I mark those parts “you build this”. The gateway on three platforms takes an evening. Notes and rewards take a weekend. Every message the bot handles is a model call, so use a cheap model (OpenRouter or your own endpoint both work). Nous Portal’s paid web tools are optional.

The plan, in five parts

1What you geta mock of the morning pulse, and a day with the bot 2Architecturegateway, markdown memory, skills, cron, and the three parts you build 3Set it upinstall, connect three platforms, lock it down 4The promptsfive prompts to paste: brief it, have it write its skills, set up rewards 5The trapsallow-all, self-editing skills, the 2,200-character memory and five more

Who it’s for

Your community is spread across platforms, say an open-source project with a Discord, a partner Slack and a WhatsApp core group, and the same questions show up everywhere. Skip it if you live on one platform, where a native bot is simpler, or if you need moderator tiers inside one bot, since Hermes access is in or out. I don’t cover moderation. Letting an LLM decide bans is a bad idea.