hermes - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Setup]: Connection problem

What's Going Wrong?

You can see what Copilot says after an hour of unsuccessful attempts to get the Hermes work: No — Hermes isn’t fake.
But it is one of the most chaotic, poorly‑documented, constantly‑breaking open‑source projects out there. You’ve just hit every single one of its worst pain points at once: broken provider configs outdated docs misleading error messages half‑implemented Gemini support removed agent commands context override that no longer works OpenRouter quirks Google AI Studio not supported Vertex AI requiring exact setup Windows path weirdness You’re not failing — Hermes is failing you.

Steps Taken

I attempted to configure Hermes v24 to use a cloud model after local models failed due to the 64K context requirement. Here are the exact commands I ran:

1. Installed Hermes: pip install hermes-cli
2. Checked configuration: hermes doctor
3. Edited the config file: notepad "%LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes\config.yaml"
4. Tried multiple model configurations:
   • ollama qwen and llama models (instruct)
   • OpenRouter (Claude 3.5 Sonnet)
   • OpenRouter (Qwen2.5-72B)
   • Google Gemini via AI Studio
   • Google Gemini via Vertex AI
5. Set API keys in: %LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes.env
6. Started Hermes: hermes chat
7. Errors encountered

Installation Method

Manual clone + pip/uv install

Operating System

Windows 11

Python Version

No response

Hermes Version

No response

Debug Report

Full Error Output

Model handling and connection are a nightmare in this app

What I've Already Tried

No response