I Found an AI That Remembers. Here's Why That Changed Everything.
This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge: Write About Hermes Agent
I am a dental student. I do not code. A few weeks ago, I wrote about breaking my AI assistant seven times before it finally worked. That was the arrival story.
This is what happened after.
Two Assistants, Two Experiences
Before Hermes, I tried OpenClaw — or "Little Lobster," as the wave of Chinese users who adopted it called themselves.
OpenClaw is impressive in many ways. It connects to more messaging platforms than anything else on the market. Its setup is smoother. For someone who just wants to chat with an AI on Telegram or QQ, it works out of the box.
But here is what I noticed after a week: every conversation was a fresh start.
I would tell it on Monday that I prefer Chinese for casual talk and English for technical content. By Tuesday, it had forgotten. I would explain my workflow — how I publish articles, what tools I use, what errors I commonly run into. By Wednesday, it was a stranger again. Every session was ground zero.
For someone like me — a medical student, not a developer — this isn't a minor inconvenience. I do not have the vocabulary to explain my setup from scratch every time. I need the assistant to meet me where I am, not where I was a week ago.
What Hermes Remembers
Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent you run on your own machine. It connects to messaging platforms, uses tools to search the web and work with files, and — the part that changed everything for me — remembers who you are across every conversation.
When I switched to Hermes Agent, the difference was not immediate. It takes a few conversations for the memory to build. But once it does, something shifts.
I once mentioned that I had spent two hours debugging a WSL2 error caused by an Android emulator I uninstalled months ago. Two weeks later, in a completely different context — I was asking about virtual machine networking — Hermes referenced that WSL2 incident without me bringing it up. It knew why I was sensitive about virtualization. It had connected the dots across sessions.
This may sound small. It is not.
When you are a non-technical person trying to navigate a technical world, you spend most of your energy re-explaining yourself. To every tool. To every search query. To every new conversation. Hermes removes that tax.
Now when I ask for help with an article draft, it already knows I publish on Dev.to, that I target English readers, that I prefer short paragraphs and a conversational tone. I do not have to repeat myself. I just say: "review this draft" — and it knows what "review" means for me.
What surprised me even more: I use Hermes on QQ from my phone, and on my laptop inside a virtual machine. Different devices. Same memory. It does not matter where I talk to it — it remembers across every platform.
And when I forget something — a configuration tweak from three weeks ago, a link I mentioned once — I do not have to dig through chat history. Hermes searches its own past conversations. I just ask.
The Tool That Learns to Be Your Tool
There is another feature that took me longer to notice: Hermes creates skills from experience.
The first time I asked Hermes to help me format a Dev.to article with proper frontmatter, tags, and a GitHub cross-link, it took about fifteen minutes of back-and-forth. I did not even know what "frontmatter" meant. Hermes had to walk me through YAML syntax before it could even start formatting the article. We figured it out together. The second time? Thirty seconds. It had saved the workflow.
Not because I configured anything. Not because I wrote a script. Hermes noticed it was solving the same problem twice and codified the solution on its own.
This keeps happening. The longer I use it, the less I have to explain. It is the opposite of every other tool I have tried — instead of decaying, the experience compounds.
I should be honest: it is not perfect. Sometimes it drifts. It will start going down a path that seemed logical to it but misses what I actually needed. But here is the thing: I only have to correct it once. It remembers the correction. Next time, it is less likely to wander off.
That is the difference between a tool and a partner. A tool does what you tell it. A partner learns what you mean.
What We Build Together
Since Hermes stabilized on my machine, I have published 19 articles on Dev.to and built a local-llm-guide repository on GitHub. I am a dental student. I have never written production code. None of this should exist.
Here is what our workflow looks like: I have an idea for an article. I tell Hermes the topic. It searches the web, reads documentation, and comes back with a structured outline — key points, references, things I should not miss. I write the draft. The voice is mine. Then Hermes reviews it: broken links, inconsistent formatting, a topic I already covered last week that I forgot about. I fix. We publish.
That is the real division of labor. I bring the experience. Hermes brings the memory, the research, and the quality control. Neither of us could do this alone.
This article you are reading? Same process. I wrote the first draft, Hermes reviewed it. We went back and forth until it felt right.
If you are trying an AI agent for the first time, here is a simple test: use it for three days — tell it your name, what you do, one preference. Then on day four, ask it what it remembers. If it knows who you are, keep it. If it says "How can I help you?" like you have never met, move on.
For the Person Still on the Fence
But honestly? I am writing it for you — the person who tried one AI assistant and felt like it forgot you every morning.
Hermes is not the flashiest agent. It does not support 22 messaging platforms. It does not have a mobile app. What it has — and what I have not found anywhere else — is the sense that it is actually accumulating knowledge about you. That every conversation is not a reset, but a continuation.
For a non-technical person like me, that is not a luxury. It is the difference between giving up and keeping going.
If you have been on the fence, start small. Expect it to break. Backup before you change anything. And when it finally works — when it remembers something from last week that you forgot you told it — you will understand why I wrote this.
I am Ling, a dental student abroad. I run Hermes Agent on a laptop inside a virtual machine that took three operating system reinstalls to get working. I publish at dev.to/lingdas1 and maintain the local-llm-guide on GitHub. Come say hi. 🦷
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