Hermes Agent is more than a chatbot. It combines sessions, snapshots, CLI commands, cron, and gateways into one system, but that also means many users only scratch the surface. Here are 12 practical tips that will immediately improve your workflow, from session management and cross-platform handoff to quick rollback and unattended automation.

1. Name Sessions with /new for Easy Retrieval

An unnamed session eventually becomes a list of IDs and “help me look at this.” Naming it lets you resume with /resume or hermes -c later.

/new payment-refactor

This sets the session title immediately. You can then use /resume payment-refactor on any platform. Titles must be unique, so prefer specific project names over “test 1.”

2. Choose the Right CLI Resume Command

Scenario	Command	Notes
Resume the last CLI session	hermes --continue or hermes -c	Picks the most recent cli session
Resume by name	hermes -c "payment-refactor"	Supports lineage; picks the latest one automatically
Resume by exact ID	hermes -r 20260721_143022_a1b2c3	Copy from hermes sessions list

If you continued the session on Telegram, you can later bring it back to the desktop with the same command.

3. Hand Off Between CLI and Telegram with /handoff

Hermes supports /handoff <platform> to migrate a live session to a messaging platform. Suppose you started a task in the CLI and want to continue it on your phone while leaving the office:

/handoff telegram

The destination platform must already be enabled and have /sethome configured. After the handoff, the CLI exits and prints a hint to resume later with /resume <title>.

4. Control Long Sessions with /compress

Long conversations can drift and become expensive. /compress summarizes earlier turns into a compact summary, freeing up context space while keeping essential information.

/compress
/compress focus payment-refactor
/compress here 20

The first form compresses globally; the second compresses around a topic; the third keeps the last 20 turns. Pair it with /new to name the compressed session so the lineage is easy to track.

5. Use /undo Instead of Manually Editing Context

If the last user input or assistant reply derailed the conversation, /undo removes the last user+assistant exchange in one step.

/undo

It does not erase everything the model learned earlier; it just takes one step back. Useful for quick experiments, prompt tuning, and iterative code edits.

6. Enable Checkpoints Before Destructive Work

Start the CLI with --checkpoints, or enable them globally in ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

checkpoints:
  enabled: true

Once enabled, Hermes automatically snapshots before write_file, patch, and risky terminal commands such as rm, cp, mv, and sed -i. Then /rollback lists checkpoints and restores them. You can even restore a single file with /rollback 1 src/main.py.

7. Browse Sessions Regularly with hermes sessions list

hermes sessions list --limit 50
hermes sessions list --source telegram

Named sessions show a title, preview, and last-active time. Unnamed sessions only show a preview and source. Naming habits pay off when you need to find something a week later.

8. Recall Past Context with session_search

Hermes has a built-in session_search tool backed by SQLite FTS5. If you discussed a topic earlier but forgot the details, let the current session search for it:

Find the auth-module refactoring we discussed before.

The agent is prompted to use session_search when it suspects prior context exists. You can also ask directly: “How did we deploy to the VPS last time?”

9. Export Sessions for Backup or Sharing

Hermes supports multiple export formats:

# Backup all sessions
hermes sessions export backup.jsonl

# Export one session as a self-contained HTML page
hermes sessions export --format html --session-id 20260721_143022_a1b2c3d4

# Export as a Hugging Face Agent Trace and upload
hermes sessions export --format trace --session-id 20260721_143022_a1b2c3d4 --upload

Add --redact when sharing to scrub API keys, tokens, and credentials.

10. Use no_agent: true for Stable Cron Jobs

For predictable, scheduled scripts such as monitoring, scraping, or reporting, set no_agent: true in the cron job:

no_agent: true
script: /path/to/script.py

This delivers the script’s stdout directly without LLM interpretation, removing unpredictability. Great for watchdogs, threshold alerts, and heartbeats.

11. Clean Up Old Sessions with hermes sessions prune

The session database grows over time, especially with gateways or cron workloads. Use hermes sessions prune to clean up:

hermes sessions prune --older-than 30
hermes sessions prune --source cron --older-than 7

The default keeps only ended sessions older than 90 days. Add --dry-run to preview. Active sessions are never deleted.

12. Back Up ~/.hermes/state.db

All session history, messages, token counts, and system prompt snapshots live in this SQLite file. Back it up regularly:

cp ~/.hermes/state.db ~/.hermes/state.db.$(date +%Y%m%d).bak

When migrating machines or reinstalling, copy this file back and use hermes -c to restore most of your working context.

Summary

These 12 tips cover the highest-friction areas of daily Hermes use: naming keeps sessions findable, compression keeps long conversations manageable, checkpoints keep changes reversible, handoff lets workflows move across platforms, and cron plus export make automation reliable. They are not new features, but combined they remove a lot of friction.

If you are new to Hermes, start with /new <task> and /compress. If you already run gateways or cron jobs, focus on checkpoints and sessions prune to prevent things from getting out of hand.