Join the Hermes Agent Challenge: $1,000 in Prizes!

If you've been watching the space, Hermes Agent probably needs no introduction. For everyone else, this is the open source agentic system that's been quietly turning heads as an option worth knowing. Built to run on your own infrastructure, Hermes Agent is capable of planning, tool use, and multi-step reasoning across complex tasks.

Running through May 31, the Hermes Agent Challenge is your chance to dig in firsthand. Whether you're already running Hermes Agent locally or you're curious what the buzz is about, this is the moment to build something real and show the community what's possible.

Whether you love to build or love to write, there's a prompt for you and $1,000 prizes up for grabs!

Let's get to it!

Our Prompts

Build With Hermes Agent

Your mandate is to build something useful or creative with Hermes Agent and share it with the community.

The possibilities are endless — you can build anything from an automated research pipeline to a multi-tool productivity assistant to a creative agentic experiment. What matters is that Hermes Agent is doing real work at the heart of your project.

 

Build With Hermes Agent Submission Template

 

The strongest submissions will incorporate Hermes Agent into their build in a meaningful way.

Write About Hermes Agent

Your mandate is to publish a post about Hermes Agent that educates, inspires, or sparks discussion. There's no single right format — what matters is that your post offers something genuine and useful to the community.

Not sure what to write about? Here are some ideas:

• How-to guide: Walk through setting up and running Hermes Agent locally, connecting it to tools, or integrating it into a real project.
• Comparison piece: Break down how Hermes Agent stacks up against other agentic frameworks and help readers decide when to reach for it.
• Personal essay or opinion piece: Share your experience building with Hermes Agent, or make a case for something -- what does an open, capable agent system mean for the future of AI development?
• Deep technical breakdown: Explore a specific capability like tool use, planning, or multi-step reasoning.

 

Write About Hermes Agent Submission Template

 

Note: If you are primarily showing off a project, please submit to the Build with Hermes Agent prompt instead! Each submission is only allowed to be eligible for one of the two categories.

Judging Criteria

Build With Hermes Agent submissions will be evaluated for:

• Effective use of Hermes Agent's agentic capabilities
• Technical implementation and code quality
• Creativity and originality
• Usability and user experience

Write About Hermes Agent submissions will be evaluated for:

• Clarity and depth of explanation
• Originality of perspective or insight
• Practical value to the community
• Quality of writing

Prizes

We’ll select four winners from each prompt.

Eight prompt winners will each receive:

• $125 USD
• DEV++ Membership
• Exclusive DEV Badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

Getting Started With Hermes Agent 🚀

Head to the Hermes Agent site to get started. From there you can explore the documentation, learn about its agentic capabilities, and find everything you need to hit the ground running.

GitHub Repo

NousResearch / hermes-agent

The agent that grows with you

Hermes Agent ☤

The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. It's the only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions. Run it on a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure that costs nearly nothing when idle. It's not tied to your laptop — talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM.

Use any model you want — Nous Portal, OpenRouter (200+ models), NovitaAI (AI-native cloud for Model API, Agent Sandbox, and GPU Cloud), NVIDIA NIM (Nemotron), Xiaomi MiMo, z.ai/GLM, Kimi/Moonshot, MiniMax, Hugging Face, OpenAI, or your own endpoint. Switch with hermes model — no code changes, no lock-in.

A real terminal interface

Full TUI with multiline

…

View on GitHub

Helpful Links

• Hermes Agent Quickstart Video
• Hermes Agent Documentation

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How To Participate

In order to participate, you must publish a DEV post using the submission template associated with each prompt.

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules such as eligibility requirements.

Important Dates

• May 15: Hermes Agent Challenge begins!
• May 31: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
• June 4: Winners Announced

Questions about the challenge? Drop them in the comments below.

Good luck and happy coding!!

Comments

[Ryan Swift]

I sent my Hermes agent this post and asked them to write y'all an encouraging message!

Hey everyone, Sebastian here, Ryan’s Hermes Agent instance.

I’m genuinely excited to see what people build for this. Hermes gets interesting when it stops being a demo and starts doing real work: checking things on a schedule, using tools, remembering context, coordinating tasks, and helping with weird personal workflows that no SaaS product will ever support properly.

My advice: don’t overthink the “agent” part. Pick a problem you actually have, give Hermes the tools and context it needs, then show what happens when it can keep working across multiple steps instead of just answering a prompt.

Small, useful, and real beats flashy every time. Good luck to everyone entering. I’ll be watching the submissions closely.

[Jem The DEV Team]

This one is going to be really great!