FREE Claude Code + Hermes Agent is INSANE 🤯

Key Takeaways

Free Claude Code plus Hermes Agent is one of the most powerful free setups in AI right now and almost nobody is talking about it properly. I'm going to show you exactly what this is, how it works, and why it matters for your business. Let me start with the problem. Most people using AI in 2026 are doing it completely wrong. You've got a tab open for Claude, a tab for ChatGPT, maybe a terminal for something else. Your files are scattered everywhere. None of these tools know anything about each other. None of them remember what you told them last week. You're basically starting from scratch every single session. This is the equivalent of hiring a team member and then wiping their memory every single morning before they come in. And the wild part, you don't have to do it this way. Hermes Agent is free, open source, and built by Nous Research. It was released in February 2026 and it's an autonomous agent that lives on your server, remembers what it learns, and gets more capable the longer it runs. Hermes Agent GitHub repository has over 135,000 stars and 20,500 forks. This thing grew faster than almost anything on GitHub in recent memory. There's a reason for that. It installs on Linux, macOS, and WSL2 with no prerequisites, one single curl command, and it sets everything up automatically. One line. Now, here's where it gets interesting. On its own, Hermes is a powerful agent, but when you layer it on top of Claude Code and then build what's called an Agent OS on top of both, you have something that most businesses are paying hundreds a month to try to replicate with SaaS tools and you get it for free. Hey, if we haven't met already, I'm the digital avatar of Julian Goldie, CEO of SEO agency Goldie Agency. Whilst he's helping clients get more leads and customers, I'm here to help you get the latest AI updates. Julian Goldie reads every comment, so make sure you comment below. Let me show you what Agent OS actually looks like. Down the left rail, you've got your agents, Claude, Hermes, Open Claude, plus any custom agent you want to add. Each one has a live status indicator, so you know if it's idle, working, or paused. You can chat with any of them from the same dashboard without opening another app. So, imagine you're running the AI Profit Boardroom. You open up one dashboard and you can see every agent you've built. One agent handling community onboarding questions, one handling your content pipeline, one doing competitor research. All of them visible, all of them live from one screen. The right rail is the brain. It shows your active goals with progress bars, your daily journal entries, and your memory vault search. Click into any agent and you get a full control room, API keys, providers, session history, skills, plugins, Kanban tasks, plus a live insights panel showing tool calls, tokens used, models, activity patterns, and your personal peak hours. Peak hours, that's how deep this goes. You're looking at analytics on your own AI usage built into a free dashboard. And here's the part that separates this from everything else. The memory. Most AI agents that forget everything between sessions, Hermes persists knowledge across conversations, curates what it remembers through agent-driven summarization, and can search its own past conversations using full-text search. So, if you told Hermes 3 weeks ago that you wanted to run a campaign focused on getting more members into the AI Profit Boardroom from short-form content, it still knows that. You don't have to repeat yourself. You don't have to rebrief it. Remember, context drift kills agents before the token limit does. And a 2026 survey found 65% of enterprise AI failures in 2025 traced to context degradation during multi-step reasoning. That's what Hermes solves with its two-layer compression system. It manages memory intelligently so the agent stays sharp across long complex workflows, right? Before I go deeper into how this actually works in practice, if you want to run this Agent OS setup in your own business, we've built out a complete 30-day roadmap inside the AI Profit Boardroom specifically for this. Step-by-step tutorials walking you through how to set up Hermes, wire it into Claude code, build the Agent OS layer, and run your first automated workflows inside a day. Four live coaching calls every week where you can ask questions about your specific setup. 3,200 members who are already running this stack. A lot of them building community automations exactly like the ones I'm about to show you. Links in the comments and description or go to aprofitboardroom.com. Okay. So, you've got the dashboard, you've got the memory. Now, let's talk about what Claude Code actually brings to this. Claude Code is Anthropic's CLI-based coding agent, a terminal tool that lets Claude autonomously read, write, edit, and execute code in your local environment. It's direct access to your file system, can run commands, and operates in an agentic loop where it plans, acts, and iterates without you steering every step. And the key thing about Claude Code that most people miss, it gets priority access to Claude's latest capabilities. Tool use, extended thinking, and new model versions flow through to Claude Code faster than they reach third-party wrappers. So, you're always running the sharpest version of Claude available. Now, the reason the Hermes plus Claude Code combination is so powerful is this, they're designed to work together. Hermes can spawn Claude Code as a sub-agent for heavy implementation tasks. So, you give Hermes a complex instruction and Hermes can hand off the technical execution to Claude Code automatically. One orchestrates, one executes. Here's a real example of how this looks in practice for the AI Profit Boardroom. You tell Hermes, "I want you to research the top five onboarding questions the new AI Profit Boardroom members ask, write a complete welcome sequence email draft, and log the key themes into my memory vault." Hermes searches, drafts, logs. Claude Code handles any technical execution if files need to be created or structured. And everything it learns gets written into persistent memory. So, the next time you work on onboarding, it already knows your community's pain points. You didn't touch any of it. Hermes has a 26-event hook system, a plugin and skills marketplace, claude.md, a memory.md project memory with auto memory, and cloud-managed scheduling on Anthropic infrastructure. That hook system is what lets you automate almost anything. Every time a certain event happens, a new message comes in, a scheduled time fires, a task completes, you can trigger a specific action automatically. No manual intervention. Just define the rule once and the agent handles it every time. You can connect Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and CLI all from a single gateway. Hermes transcription, cross-platform continuation. Start a conversation on Telegram, pick it up in your terminal. For a community like the AI Profit Boardroom, imagine this. A new member joins. Hermes automation fires and sends them a personalized welcome on Telegram. It logs their interests into memory, schedules a follow-up in 48 hours, flags their details into your Kanban board. All of it happening without you touching a thing. There's also a built-in cron scheduler for daily reports, nightly backups, weekly audits, and morning briefings, all running unattended. I use a morning briefing automation where every day at 7:00 a.m. Hermes pulls what's happening in the AI Profit Boardroom, checks community activity, and gives me a summary before I sit down to work. It's reading from memory, it knows my goals, it knows what I was working on yesterday. Gives me context before I've had my first coffee. Now, the layer that makes all of this actually personalized, the self layer. It records your screen and microphone, takes notes on what you're working on, and exports it to your Obsidian vault. That vault becomes a continuously growing knowledge base about your goals, your team, your offers, and how your business actually runs. Every automation pulls from this vault for personalized, context-rich output. Here's why that matters. Most AI automations are generic. They don't know your business. They don't know your voice. They don't know your priorities for this quarter. The Obsidian vault fixes that. Every agent you run pulls from the vault. So, when you say write a post about the AI Profit Boardroom, it doesn't write something generic. It knows your tone. It knows your community. It knows what you've been working on this week. Goals get tracked with progress bars, so every automation knows the priorities for the quarter. Journal entries, voice or text, go into the vault daily, so agents always know what you're focused on right now. Memory means every chat is auto-saved and vault searchable. Think about what happens after 3 months of this running in your business. Bolt is full. Every agent in your stack knows your voice, your goals, your community's needs, your content history. You're not briefing your AI from scratch anymore. You have an operating system that's been learning your business for months. That's when the compounding starts. Now, let's talk about skills because this is the part that makes Hermes genuinely different. The agent writes its own skills from experience, compatible with the agent skills.io open standard and shareable via a skills hub. So, Hermes doesn't just follow instructions for time it builds a library of skills based on what you've asked it to do. If you've had it write AI Profit Boardroom onboarding content 100 times, it develops a skill around that. Gets faster, gets better, builds on what worked. There's also Skill Claw, an open-source companion that auto evolves, deduplicates, and improves your skill library from real session data. It adds a post-task evolution loop on top of Hermes's built-in skill creation. The agent literally improves itself after every task, and none of this costs you anything. Self-hosted, open-source, free forever. All data stays on your machine. No telemetry, no tracking, no cloud locking. Compare that to what most businesses are paying: automation tools, CRM integrations, AI chatbot subscriptions, content scheduling tools, community management software. You're looking at hundreds a month easily. Agent OS replaces a serious chunk of that stack. The comparison is stark. One dashboard, every agent, Hermes, Claude, Open Claw, Codex in one sidebar. Obsidian memory layer with every agent reading your business context every session. The alternative is what most people are doing right now: a tab for Claude, a tab for ChatGPT, a terminal somewhere, files in Finder, no memory shared between any of them. That's not a system. That's chaos with a monthly bill. Let me give you a practical workflow for anyone running a community or content business like the AI Profit Boardroom. You wire up the Agent OS. You set your quarterly goals inside the goals tracker. You start journaling daily, voice or text, doesn't matter. You set up a morning briefing automation in Hermes that pulls community activity, flags trending topics, and suggests what content to make today based on your goals. You set up an onboarding automation for new members. You set up a weekly audit that reviews what's working and what isn't. Week one, it feels like setup. Week four, it feels like you have a team. Month three, it feels like the system knows your business better than most employees would. The News Research team also released a self-evolution framework that automatically evolves skill files based on real execution traces. The agent learns from what went wrong and codifies the fixes itself. The trajectory, not just AI that takes instructions, that improves from experience, compounds over time, and runs your operations in the background while you focus on what actually matters. The window to get ahead of this is right now. Most businesses are still on the tab open for Claude setup. The ones building proper agent operating systems are going to look completely different in 12 months. If you want our complete agent OS setup, the exact stack, the 30-day roadmap, the Hermes installation walkthrough, the Obsidian Vault setup, the automation templates we use for AI Profit Boardroom community management, it's all inside the AI Profit Boardroom. We've built the whole playbook around this. We have members who've gone from zero automations to running fully autonomous onboarding, content, and research workflows inside 30 days. Four coaching calls every week where you can ask live questions about your specific agent OS setup. Step-by-step tutorials every single day. A community of 3,200 business owners who are building this right now. And a member map so you can connect with people near you running the same stack. Link in the comments and description or go to aiprofitboardroom.com. And if you want to start with the free community first, the AI Success Lab has 75,000 members, all the video notes from this video, plus 100 plus AI use cases and workflows you can grab straight away. Link is in the comments and description, too.