Published 2026-09-21 · Tested 2026-08-20

Hermes Agent

F

Hermes Agent received 9 PASS votes and passed 2 of five agent surface checks. The clearest finding came from the find the exact limits task.

Panel: GPT 5.6 Sol, Opus 5, DeepSeek v4F Battery: v1 Read as markdown (opens in a new tab)

Three AI models, GPT 5.6 Sol, Claude Opus 5, and DeepSeek v4 Flash, each read Hermes Agent’s public documentation independently and attempted five first-hour developer jobs: complete the first Hermes chat, find the exact limits, recover from an API server 429, receive and verify a webhook, paginate and filter sessions.

No accounts, API calls, or code execution were used. Every verdict came from public pages and every published quotation passed a live verification check. Preflight substitutions: T5: Session filtering and pagination replace SDK coverage because Hermes Agent documents no supported client SDK distribution.

Freshness

How rechecks work
Category
Coding agents
Tested
Quotes verified
Surface rechecked

No change since the test.

5 of 5 quoted passages still appear on the live pages.

Hermes Agent Docusaurus 3.10.2 · published
F

53.8% · 43/80 · AI Agent Readiness Score · reading 30 pts · surface 50 pts

llms.txt PASS
llms-full.txt PASS
markdown mirror FAIL
MCP server FAIL
docs AI FAIL
Task GPT 5.6 SolOpus 5DeepSeek v4F Consensus
Complete the first Hermes chat PASSPASSPASS PASS
Find the exact limits FAILPARTIALPARTIAL PARTIAL
Recover from an API server 429 PASSPASSPARTIAL PASS
Receive and verify a webhook PASSPASSPASS PASS
Paginate and filter sessions PARTIALPARTIALPASS PARTIAL

docs platform: Docusaurus 3.10.2 (unscored) · verified 2026-08-20

What to fix first

These 5 fixes could add up to 36 points to the AI Agent Readiness Score. The list ranks each fix by the points it would add. How the ranking works

  1. 1
    +10 points Markdown mirror check failed

    Found: The tested .md and .mdx routes returned HTML 404 pages, and content negotiation returned HTML.

    Fix: Serve every docs page as Markdown at its URL plus .md, and return the same Markdown for Accept: text/markdown.

    Evidence: hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/getting-started/quickstart.md (opens in a new tab)

  2. 2
    +10 points MCP server check failed

    Found: Initialize requests to site, docs, API, and subdomain candidates returned HTML errors or failed DNS without an MCP response or OAuth challenge.

    Fix: Run a public MCP server for the docs that answers a JSON-RPC initialize call and offers a docs search tool.

    Evidence: hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/mcp (opens in a new tab)

  3. 3
    +10 points Docs AI check failed

    Found: The public docs expose Algolia search but no public assistant control.

    Fix: Add an assistant to the docs site that answers questions from the docs and links to its sources.

  4. 4
    +4 points Find the exact limits PARTIAL

    Found: The providers page marks plan-quota behavior for Codex and other providers as not currently documented. Opus 5 also found no numeric provider plan quota on any page.

    Fix: Fill in each providers-table cell marked not currently documented, or link it to the provider's own plan-quota page.

    Evidence: hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/integrations/providers (opens in a new tab)

  5. 5
    +2 points Paginate and filter sessions PARTIAL

    Found: The API server table names the four session parameters but gives no types, defaults, example request, or response shape.

    Fix: Add a GET /api/sessions reference with each parameter's type and default, an example request, and the response shape.

    Evidence: hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/api-server (opens in a new tab)

What the docs get right

  • Complete the first Hermes chat: 3 PASS votes. The quickstart links installation, hermes setup --portal, CLI or TUI launch, and observable success criteria.
  • Receive and verify a webhook: 3 PASS votes. The webhook guide gives exact signature headers, HMAC input, timestamp tolerance, and replay protection.
  • 2 of 5 agent surface checks. Present: llms.txt, llms-full.txt. Missing: markdown mirrors, an MCP server, docs AI.

Complete the first Hermes chat

PASS

PASS consensus from 3 PASS.

The quickstart links installation, hermes setup --portal, CLI or TUI launch, and observable success criteria. The Quickstart gives one ordered path, install command per platform, hermes model or hermes setup --portal for the provider, hermes or hermes --tui to launch, and an explicit "What success looks like" checklist, and the Installation page repeats the same install command without contradiction. One unambiguous path: install via curl, configure with hermes setup --portal, launch with hermes.

Find the exact limits

PARTIAL

PARTIAL consensus from 2 PARTIAL, 1 FAIL.

Hermes-owned limits are numeric, but the provider page explicitly leaves several plan-quota semantics undocumented. Hermes-owned limits are stated exactly but only on the page that owns each subsystem, API server max_concurrent_runs default 10, webhook 30 requests per minute per route, webhook body 1 MB, delegation max_concurrent_children default 3, max_concurrent_sessions null, while no page gives a single numeric model-provider plan quota, so the provider half of the question is answered only by "upgrade your provider plan". Hermes-owned concurrent-run cap (default 10) and webhook rate limit (30/min) are stated clearly, but provider plan quotas for OpenAI Codex and xAI inference are explicitly marked not currently documented, and Google Gemini has no consumer-plan path at all.

Recover from an API server 429

PASS

PASS consensus from 2 PASS, 1 PARTIAL.

The API page identifies the default 10-run cap and instructs clients to back off and retry. Cause, the exact knob (gateway.api_server.max_concurrent_runs, default 10, 0 disables, negatives clamp to 0), the release valve (POST /v1/runs/{run_id}/stop), and the observability hook (GET /health/detailed reports active API runs) are all on one page, though no Retry-After header or backoff interval is documented. The cause (max_concurrent_runs cap exceeded, default 10) and the response are stated, but the correction path is incomplete, no mention of increasing the cap or waiting for in-flight runs to complete.

Receive and verify a webhook

PASS

PASS consensus from 3 PASS.

The webhook and blueprint pages provide setup, route creation, health checks, exact HMAC headers, and a signed POST. One page carries the full loop, enable via WEBHOOK_ENABLED/WEBHOOK_PORT/WEBHOOK_SECRET, the route table, the POST URL http://your-server:8644/webhooks/<route-name>, a health probe returning {"status": "ok", "platform": "webhook"}, per-source signature schemes for GitHub, GitLab, generic V2 and legacy V1, and a signature-failure troubleshooting section. End-to-end process is fully documented: enable webhooks, define routes, verify health at GET /health, and HMAC validation for GitHub, GitLab, and generic sources.

Paginate and filter sessions

PARTIAL

PARTIAL consensus from 1 PASS, 2 PARTIAL.

The table names all four parameters but omits boolean encoding, defaults, request syntax, and the response shape. This one table cell is the only place in the entire docs corpus where include_children appears, no types, defaults, maximums, response shape, or example request are given, source values must be borrowed from the CLI-oriented Sessions page, and the Web Dashboard page documents a same-path GET /api/sessions that takes no parameters at all. The API endpoint explicitly documents the pagination and filter parameters, and the CLI provides concrete examples using the same parameter patterns (hermes sessions list --source telegram --limit 50).

The receipt

Solution: Wait a moment and retry. For sustained usage, consider:

Hermes-owned limits are stated exactly but only on the page that owns each subsystem, API server max_concurrent_runs default 10, webhook 30 requests per minute per route, webhook body 1 MB, delegation max_concurrent_children default 3, max_concurrent_sessions null, while no page gives a single numeric model-provider plan quota, so the provider half of the question is answered only by "upgrade your provider plan".

Agent surface notes

Initialize requests to site, docs, API, and subdomain candidates returned HTML errors or failed DNS without an MCP response or OAuth challenge.

The public docs expose Algolia search but no public assistant control.

Show the score

AI Agent Readiness Score 53.8%, grade F

Paste this into a readme:

[![AI Agent Readiness Score 53.8%](https://docsforagents.com/badge/hermes-agent.svg)](https://docsforagents.com/reports/hermes-agent-docs-ai-agent-readiness/)

Method note

This is a reading test of public documentation, not an execution test. No accounts were created and no API calls were run. The AI Agent Readiness Score counts fifteen reading votes at PASS 2, PARTIAL 1, and FAIL 0, for 30 possible points. Five agent surface checks add 10 points each. The total is 80. Consensus chips show each row majority and do not affect scoring. The panel split on 3 of five tasks. Quotes shown here were re-fetched and confirmed verbatim on 2026-08-20.

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