Most people install Hermes and treat it like a smarter ChatGPT. They wire up Telegram, point it at a model, type a request, get a response. Then they close the window and call it a day.
If that's you, you're using roughly 8% of what Hermes can actually do.
Here are 15 features, ranked by how much they change your output. Most people who've been running Hermes for months have never touched a single one on this list.
## THE SETUP MOST PEOPLE SKIP ENTIRELY
## 1. /personality + SOUL.md
Hermes reads a single file at boot called SOUL.md. Whatever you put in there becomes your agent's voice forever. Across every session, every platform, every backend. Use /personality to switch between named personas mid-conversation.
Define how it talks. What it refuses. Who it thinks it's writing for. Write it once. Stop typing "you are a senior X expert" at the top of every conversation.
Most people retype the same role primer every single session.
## 2. MEMORY.md + USER.md
Two persistent files Hermes reads on every session. MEMORY.md is the agent's notebook on what's true about your projects. USER.md is what it knows about you specifically: your role, your tone, your context, your tradeoff preferences.
Indexed with FTS5 and an LLM summarizer so the agent can pull a relevant memory from 8 weeks ago into a session today.
Most people re-explain who they are every time they open a new chat.
## 3. /insights [days]
Analytics across every session you've ever run. Which projects ate the most tokens. Which providers cost what. What the agent stalled on. What you keep coming back to.
/insights 30 shows you the last month at a glance.
Most people open a new session blind because they didn't know /insights exists.
## 4. /snapshot
Save the entire Hermes config and state as a snapshot before you do anything risky. Experiment, break things, /snapshot restore
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