Nous Research Co-Founder on Building the Self-Improving Hermes Agent
petergyang · x · 2026-08-02
This podcast features Karan Malhotra, co-founder of Nous Research, diving deep into the philosophy and practice behind building Hermes, the #1 personal agent on OpenRouter.
Key takeaways include:
- Differentiation: How Hermes differs from tools like Claude Code and Codex, and strategies to prevent AI from generating generic, monotonous slop.
- Skill Acquisition: The mechanism for creating and learning new skills without bloating the model's context window.
- Open Source vs. Safety: The debate on how open-source models impact AI safety compared to closed models.
- Workflow Integration: Using a unified Kanban board to manage workflows for both humans and AI agents.
- Live Demo: Rebuilding a childhood classic Sonic the Hedgehog world using Hermes.
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