Hermes Agent is an open source alternative to Lindy. Open source Lindy alternative: self-hosted AI agent with cron automations, messaging gateway, and self-improving skills. MIT. Technical setup, not no-code. MIT licensed, 228.9k GitHub stars, self-host with Docker, no terminal required to start, and last released 2026-08-03.
Open source Lindy alternative: self-hosted AI agent with cron automations, messaging gateway, and self-improving skills. MIT. Technical setup, not no-code.
Developers and power users who want an open, model-agnostic personal AI agent reachable over Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, CLI, or email, with cron-based scheduled automations, subagent delegation, persistent memory (FTS5 search over past conversations), and an agent-authored skills system compatible with the open agentskills.io standard. Works with any LLM provider by design, Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, or your own endpoint, and does not require Nous Research's own Hermes models. Built by Nous Research, a credible, well-resourced AI research lab (also known for the Hermes model series and DisTro/Psyche decentralized training), with roughly 2,237 GitHub contributors and daily commit activity as of this review.
You want Lindy's zero-code, hosted experience: sign up, click to connect Gmail, Slack, and your calendar through OAuth, and go, with nothing to install and no config files to touch. Hermes Agent needs a real install, desktop app, shell one-liner, Docker, or build from source, plus choosing and configuring an LLM provider (API key or a paid Nous Portal subscription), and its skills are authored and edited as Markdown files, not built on a visual drag-and-drop canvas. This is a self-hosted, technical alternative for developers and power users, not a drop-in no-code replacement for Lindy's UX.
One Hacker News user calls the project 'unresponsive, unintuitive, unsafe, vibe-coded' and advises against trusting it with confidential information or paying for a hosted or self-hosted deployment. Two GitHub bug reports corroborate reliability concerns: issue #32384 describes `hermes update` corrupting the local git repo and breaking installation, and issue #24537 describes file operations producing inconsistent, unpredictable results against the same path with no observable difference in inputs. Separately, star count (219,518), forks (41,660), and roughly 2,237 contributors after about one year online are unusually large even by 2026 AI-tool standards, larger than most established dev tools. The numbers are API-verified and internally consistent, but the scale itself is a genuine outlier worth a gut check before treating the popularity as a headline claim on its own.
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Community proof
Some quotes here endorse the approach rather than report first-hand use, or report a problem. We label those.
"I use PI ( https://pi.dev ) and ( https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/ ) as the main drivers together with deepseek-v4-pro as the main model (~10M/day tokens overall there). Hermes basically rules my personal life at this point - it is a _very_ useful personal assistant. I also use it at work (integrated at Slack) and at this point it answers most of both my emails and slack messages (I calibrated https://github.com/blader/humanizer with a large corpus of my own voice to make it less annoying for the others)."
"native mcp tools are the way to go - frontend is essentially dead. The future is you having an OpenClaw/Hermes agent connected to these native MCPs and you texting on telegram/whatsapp etc.. with your agent to get information."
"Automation is also a squishy term I’ve been playing around with Hermes agent the last few weeks, and I found it very difficult to find useful things that you can do by itself. And even at work, most of my AI usage is rather interactive other than research task that I can send fire and forget."
"The entire Hermes Agent project is unresponsive, unintuitive, unsafe, vibe-coded — do not entrust it with any confidential information, I advise against buying a subscription or hosting it locally. It is a really poor project."
"I have been struggling to find any real benefit to using this for a few weeks now. Since the post is in r/hermesagent, the responses are bound to be biased.
I would love to hear some input from the people in here regarding Hermes.
This is not a hate campaign directed at Hermes; I would just like to understand its value, because currently, it feels like a huge waste of time and tokens LOL"
