Use Hermes Agent with any model

Set it up

1. 01

   The configuration surface

   Hermes has a first-class notion of a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so nothing here needs a plugin. The file is ~/.hermes/config.yaml, and the short form points the whole agent at one endpoint:

   ~/.hermes/config.yaml

   model:
     provider: custom
     default: openai/gpt-4o-mini
     base_url: https://api.hopscotchlabs.ai/v1
     api_key: ub_live_XXXXXXXXXXXX

   hermes model, run in your terminal outside a session, walks the same fields interactively and writes them to the same file.

   Hermes does not append /v1. Every custom endpoint example in its documentation carries the version prefix, so include it.

2. 02

   Prefer the named form

   The block above is one endpoint for the whole agent. The named form is better here for a reason that has nothing to do with tidiness: it can read the key from your environment rather than holding it.

   ~/.hermes/config.yaml

   providers:
     hopscotch:
       api: https://api.hopscotchlabs.ai/v1
       key_env: HOPSCOTCH_API_KEY
       transport: chat_completions
       default_model: unirouter/auto

   bash

   export HOPSCOTCH_API_KEY=ub_live_YOUR_KEY_HERE

   api is the base URL, and base_url and url are accepted spellings of the same field. transport picks the wire: chat_completions is the one this site is about, and the wizard sets it explicitly rather than leaving it to be detected.

3. 03

   Pin the model id, in more places than one

   Hermes routes a set of auxiliary tasks, including vision, web summarisation and the compression that shortens a long session, to your main chat model by default, and each of those is its own request. They can be pointed at a different model per task. Whatever you point them at needs to be a pinned id too, or those tasks fail while the main loop keeps working, which is a confusing shape of failure.

4. 04

   Keys, and the file that gets committed

   The key belongs in your environment or in ~/.hermes/.env, both of which sit outside your repository.

   Mint a key for Hermes rather than reusing one.

These models support tool calling and take at least 128K tokens of context. Prices are per million tokens.

What changes when Hermes Agent runs through Hopscotch