agentos.guide › blog
Best Local Model For Hermes Agent (And The Exact Setup)
Hermes is the body — always on, hands on your machine.
The model is the brain.
Get the pairing right and you have a free agent that works offline, around the clock.
This is the setup from the "Gemma 4: Run Hermes Free Forever" video, plus what we've learned benchmarking every local model since.
Pick by your hardware
16GB laptop → Gemma 4 12B. Google's open model, near the quality of models twice its size, laptop-ready.
ollama pull it, then either launch Hermes with the model flag or select Ollama → Gemma 4 in the Hermes web UI's model picker.
Ten minutes, $0, offline.
32GB+ Mac → Agents-A1. InternScience's agent-tuned 35B MoE only activates .3B per token, so it runs at .95 tok/s — and it was trained for exactly the tool-calling, long-horizon work Hermes does.
On the GoldieBench local board it's the #2 local model overall and the best at agent speed.
🔥 Want the exact best local model for hermes agent setup I use?
Inside the AI Profit Boardroom you get the full step-by-step tutorials, the installable Agent OS, weekly coaching calls and 4,000+ members building real automations.
The routing trick from the video: main model + sub-agent
Don't make the local model do everything.
Set a stronger main model as Hermes's planner, and register the local model as the sub-agent for auxiliary tasks — summaries, file reads, small builds.
Your token spend collapses because the free brain absorbs the grunt work while the smart brain only plans.
No good hardware? Free API fallback
Gemma 4's bigger 26B/31B variants are available as free APIs via OpenRouter — plug that key into Hermes instead and you get the same brain without local compute.
Slower and rate-limited, but genuinely $0.
What people actually build with this
From the video and the community: 7am morning briefs, inbox triage, weekly reviews of an Obsidian vault, research runs, working games and mini apps.
The pattern is always the same — schedule it in Hermes, let the free brain run it.
Related deep-dives: Hermes v0.18 walkthrough · Agents-A1 benched on 45 builds.
FAQ
What's the best local model for Hermes Agent right now?
On 16GB machines: Gemma 4 12B via Ollama. On 32GB+ Macs: Agents-A1 — agent-tuned and roughly 95 tok/s, the best speed-quality balance we've benchmarked for agentic loops.
How do I connect a local model to Hermes?
Install Ollama, pull the model, then pick it in Hermes's web UI model settings (Ollama provider) or pass the model flag at launch. The whole loop then runs on localhost.
Can Hermes with a local model work offline?
Yes — that's the headline feature. On a flight with no Wi-Fi, scheduled tasks and chats keep working because everything runs on your machine.
Is a local model good enough for real work?
For sub-agent duties and everyday automation, absolutely. For frontier reasoning, route a stronger main model on top — the main + sub-agent split gives you both.
About Julian
I'm Julian Goldie — AI entrepreneur, SEO expert, and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom (4,000+ members).
I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation, and SEO.
400K+ YouTube subscribers. 7-figure AI agency (Goldie Agency). Daily training inside the Boardroom.
Related reading
→ Best Free Ai Model For Hermes Agent
🌐 Sister-site take: read this on GoldieBench — with the benchmark data.
Get the whole Agent OS
The installable system behind every guide on this site — dashboard, agents, memory, pipelines — updated daily, with 3,900+ founders and weekly coaching calls.
Join the AI Profit Boardroom →📺 Video notes + links to the tools 👉 AI Profit Boardroom
🆓 Get a FREE AI Course + Community + 1,000 AI Agents 👉 AI Money Lab
🎥 See every guide 👉 agentos.guide