Hermes Desktop App Walkthrough: Sessions, Artifacts, Cron & Profiles

Key Takeaways

• Hermes Desktop replaces the need for Telegram, CLI, and Discord — all sessions live in one organized left-side panel with folder support and pinning.
• Create separate sessions (threads) for every area of your life or work — content, investing, coding — so context stays organized and never bleeds between topics.
• Artifacts stores every link, file, and image you send to or receive from your agent; send a URL to Hermes saying "save this" and retrieve it from Artifacts later instead of bookmarking in a browser.
• Turn off unused default skills immediately after setup — iMessage, Find My, Apple Reminders, and others are on by default and burn tokens for nothing; Skills & Tool Sets panel lets you toggle them off with one click.
• The Cron UI lets you visually validate, hardcode exact times, test, and pause scheduled jobs — fixing the common complaint that cron jobs set via Telegram run once and stop.
• Profiles = separate Hermes agents with different skills, memories, and models. Use sub-agents (copies of the main agent) for parallel tasks; use separate Profiles when you need different roles and tool sets.
• Memory compression threshold: lower it to 0.5 (from default) for better long-term memory recall — recommended by the Nous Research team.

Commands & Settings Mentioned

# Download Hermes Desktop — link provided in video description
# macOS, Windows, Linux supported

# After install: go to Skills & Tool Sets
# Toggle OFF any skills you don't use (saves tokens):
# - iMessage
# - Find My
# - Apple Reminders

# Cron management via desktop UI:
# Profiles → New Cron → set schedule manually
# Click "Test" to confirm a cron job fires
# Click "Pause" to suspend without deleting

# Memory tuning — Settings → Memory & Contact:
# Compression threshold: 0.5 (recommended)

# Multiple profiles — top-right Profile button:
# New Profile → name → assign skills/models/SOUL.md
# Use separate profiles for agents with different roles, not for sub-tasks