# Hermes Agent — Agents That Grow With You (Practical AI, 2026-05-21)

**Source:** Practical AI Podcast
**Guest:** Jeffrey Quesnelle (CTO & co-founder, Nous Research)
**Hosts:** Daniel Whitenack, Chris Benson
**Date:** 2026-05-21

## Overview

Jeffrey Quesnelle, CTO of Nous Research, discusses the evolution of Nous from a Discord community to a leading open source AI company, the philosophy and architecture behind Hermes Agent (the #1 open source agent repo on GitHub), the geopolitics of open source AI, and practical advice for agent usage.

## Key Topics

### Nous Research Evolution
- Started as Discord community of independent AI researchers ("loose collaboration of the homies")
- Formed company ~2 years ago to let open source researchers work full-time
- North Star: keep AI open, accessible to as many people as possible
- Pivoted through: academic research → Hermes fine-tunes → distributed training research → Hermes Agent

### Hermes Agent Architecture
- Built by "Technium" — a non-developer who used AI tools to create the #1 GitHub open source agent repo
- Core philosophy: "The agent that gets better the more you use it"
- **Skill system:** agent autonomously observes patterns, creates reusable skills. Example: Las Vegas restaurant booking — took 30-45 min first time (captchas, API discovery), instant the second time
- **Hierarchical memory:** notes about user, past sessions, communication preferences — all activated at LLM's discretion
- Minimal hard-coded features: only code execution, web browsing. Everything else emergent through prompts
- Nous employs "LLM whisperers" who craft prompts to encourage self-reflection
- Local-first: runs with local models as first-class citizen; hosted option available

### Model vs. Harness
- Analogy: model = brain, harness = body
- IQ 150 in wheelchair limited vs IQ 95 with athlete's body — symbiotic relationship
- The harness touches reality; models only output tokens
- Future: outcome-based payment — pay for jobs done, not tokens

### Open Source AI Geopolitics
- **Western retreat:** Llama 4 failure ($200-400M paperweight) killed Meta's enthusiasm; Western open source models largely disappeared
- **Chinese surge:** DeepSeek near-SOTA shocked geopolitics; Chinese companies use open source as growth hack — release model → instant visibility
- **NVIDIA's $20B commitment:** Jensen Huang at GTC committed to training Western-provenance open source models — NVIDIA uniquely aligned: everything runs on their chips regardless ("the house always wins")

### Practical Agent Usage Advice
- Automate: tasks requiring infinite patience but zero creativity
- Don't think in human roles (CEO agent, CFO agent) — think operations
- Don't tell the agent HOW — describe outcomes and success criteria
- "Get out of the way of the model" — long-horizon planning is improving
- Be explicit: unspoken assumptions persist because AIs lack shared human experience
- "Explain it like I'm an alien" — because the AI is one
- AI limitations: no aesthetic judgment (no lived human experience), regresses to the mean (not truly novel)

### Nous Dogfooding
- 99.99% of Hermes Agent code written by Hermes Agent
- Multiple agents deployed internally: backend debugging via MCP, read-only infrastructure access
- One engineer showed it once → now support staff uses the same agent
- Emergent knowledge transfer across organization

### Personal
- Quesnelle had a baby 5 days ago — contemplating what world she'll grow up in
- Mission: human-centric AI — "better today than yesterday, better tomorrow than today"

## Notable Quotes

- "The agent that gets better the more you use it"
- "Model is the brain, the harness is your body"
- "Infinite patience, but very little creativity"
- "Show me incentive, I'll show your outcome"
- "There's never been a time more where a single person's leverage can be maximized"
- "Explain it to me like I'm an alien — because that's really what the AI is"
- "If you have the vision and the drive and the care, this technology can make you a thousand X"

## Tags

ai-agents, open-source-ai, nous-research, hermes-agent, agent-architecture, llm, agent-harness, nvidia, deepseek, geopolitics