# Hermes Agent began as an open harness for reinforcement learning

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/hermes-agent-began-as-an-open-harness-for-reinforcement/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Karan Malhotra](https://realalpha.app/people/karan-malhotra/) · Karan Malhotra is cofounder of Nous Research.
- Host: [Peter Yang](https://realalpha.app/people/peter-yang/) · Host, Behind the Craft · Led product at Roblox, Reddit, Twitch and Meta for 10+ years.
- Show: Behind the Craft
- Episode: [Hermes Co-Founder on Building an AI Agent That Improves Itself | Karan Malhotra](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/), Aug 2, 2026
- Moment: 42:35 to 46:05 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/hermes-agent-began-as-an-open-harness-for-reinforcement/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=2555

## Quote

> “And we built Hermes Agent initially to **let anybody do RL** inside of a harness.”
> — [Karan Malhotra](https://realalpha.app/people/karan-malhotra/) at [43:53](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=2633) · Behind the Craft

## Takeaways

1. Forge was an earlier self-learning-agent project put on ice.
2. Hermes Agent was first released as an open RL harness.
3. Malhotra expects model prices to converge and provider choice to matter.

## About this segment

Nous first built Hermes Agent so anyone could run RL inside a harness, reviving an earlier self-learning-agent idea as models improved. Karan Malhotra expects model prices to converge, making provider choice matter.

From “Hermes Co-Founder on Building an AI Agent That Improves Itself | Karan Malhotra”, Aug 2, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[42:43](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=2563) And now Hermes Agent was created in two ways. In the first way, we always knew that we would want some kind of everything orchestrator that self-learns, that improves, that stores memories, that uses and can make its own tools, that can make itself better. We actually made something like this called Forge. There's a GitHub presentation at the GitHub offices during one of our demo days where we showcase Forge in its full effect.

[43:10](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=2590) And we also have the News Research Forge division shirts still up on the site. That's the first shirt we ever made because that was our earliest agent project. Forge was really a spiritual predecessor to Hermes agent years before, but the models weren't there yet. The model simply wasn't there yet. So we put Forge on ice. And when we saw that Codex and Cloud Code and these other harnesses were being used as RL environments for these companies, these labs, to train on your data and your traces to make their models better inside of a harness system, inside of a CLI computer-using system, Technium thought we need an open version of this where anybody can do this.

[43:54](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=2634) See, we have this RL environments microservice people seem to have forgotten about called Atropos that lets you build. your own RL environments. And we built Hermes Agent initially to let anybody do RL inside of a harness. And we put it out for free as an open source harness for that. It turned out to be extremely capable. It got a lot of community love. And so we said, we need to put all of this. This is what the people want to be better. We're going to make it the best thing that you could possibly have. Technium took his charter up and he worked on self-improvement with Hermes Agent to the point that today the biggest contributor of HermesAgent is HermesAgent.

[44:33](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=2673) Yeah, is that true? Yeah. That's absolutely 100% true. Nice, nice. Okay, so HermesAgent is at a point where taking input of people's feedback, start publishing stuff, start improving. It is the most active contributor of its own repo. And if that's not self-improvement, then you tell me what it is. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome, dude. That's pretty awesome. Yeah, and just real quick, like on the future, you know having this open harness be in the game along with all the other closed harnesses makes things a little bit more fair right because then you're not dependent on any single company i agree completely if you have um cloud code you can only use anthropic models unless you mod and you can only be subsidized by anthropic and same for codex the cost of switching models is zero right so giving you that freedom means you can do anything that you'd like you can come

[45:21](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=2721) from anywhere i feel like you know i'm kind of spoiled by these like all you can eat plants but So I think if you want to get a mass adoption, the cost is a big deal. So you have to be able to use a portfolio of models to figure this out. I agree. We don't know how long the subsidies will last for these. Already we see that on July 7th, the table is going to be API and usage only. The time in the world will come where the best models are the same cost everywhere.

[45:48](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=2748) And so in preparation for that and in preparation for needing an open future where anyone can can use any model, we have Hermitization Center as it is today. Awesome, dude. Well, thanks so much, man.