Set up Hermes Agent, the open-source self-hosted AI assistant from Nous Research that writes its own reusable skills and keeps all your data on your own machine. A beginner-friendly micro course: understand what makes Hermes different, install it with a single command, run your first useful tasks, and stay safe with a practical permissions checklist. Prefer a chat-app interface instead? Try the OpenClaw micro course (/courses/micro-openclaw-ai-agent).
Most AI assistants live in someone else's cloud and forget everything between chats. Hermes Agent, the open-source assistant released by Nous Research in February 2026, takes the opposite approach: it runs on your own machine, keeps its data local, and writes itself reusable skills so it gets better at your work the longer you use it. This free micro course gets you from curious to running in under an hour.
In six short lessons you'll learn what makes Hermes distinctive (self-improvement, local self-hosting with no telemetry, and reach across Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and the command line), then install it with a single command, connect a language-model backend, and hand it your first genuinely useful tasks. You don't need to be a developer. If you can paste a command into a terminal and follow a recipe, you can complete this course.
It's written for students and professionals who want a private assistant they control rather than a career in software engineering. Because an agent that acts on your behalf needs real access, a full lesson covers permissions and safety with an honest, practical checklist: start sandboxed, install only trusted skills, scope access narrowly, watch your API costs, and keep a human in the loop for anything irreversible.
The course is 100% free, with no credit card and no signup wall, and finishing it earns you a free certificate of completion for your LinkedIn and resume. Prefer a chat-app-first agent? A closing lesson points you to the OpenClaw alternative and a side-by-side comparison so you can choose with confidence.
3 modules • 6 lessons
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June 15, 2026
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Hermes Agent is an open-source, self-hosted AI assistant from Nous Research that runs entirely on your own machine and writes its own reusable skills over time. This course walks you through understanding what makes Hermes unique, installing it with a single command, completing your first practical tasks, and setting sensible permissions so your data stays private.
Yes, the course is completely free to take. Finishing all lessons and passing the final exam earns you a certificate of completion that you can add to your LinkedIn profile or resume.
No coding background is required. The course is designed for beginners and covers the single install command step by step, so anyone comfortable using a computer can follow along.
Because Hermes runs locally on your own machine, no conversation content or files are sent to external servers. The course explains this privacy model in the first module and revisits it in the safety checklist lesson.
The final module covers a practical permissions checklist that helps you decide which folders and system resources Hermes Agent can access. It also points you toward next steps for expanding Hermes once you are comfortable with the basics.
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