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7/24/2026

How to run Hermes, a self-improving personal AI agent, fully local with QVAC
Short summary
Hermes Agent from Nous Research is a personal AI agent with persistent memory, customizable persona (SOUL.md), and self-improving skills that runs fully locally using QVAC, an open-source SDK from Tether. Running locally keeps persona data, memory, and learned skills on-device, works offline, eliminates per-token costs, and prevents silent model swaps. The guide recommends Qwen3.6-35B-A3B as a capable MoE model for tool-heavy agent workloads.
- •Hermes Agent features persistent memory, persona customization via SOUL.md, and background skill curation
- •QVAC provides local model inference across NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Apple Silicon with an OpenAI-compatible server
- •Local deployment ensures privacy, offline capability, zero per-token cost, and no silent model swaps
Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.
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