Hermes Memory Setup: Blank To Remembering In 5 Steps
Wondering how the Hermes memory setup actually goes? The quick version is five steps and one habit — vault, wiring, seed notes, agents writing back, and a recall test that proves it worked. The full walkthrough follows.
Short answer
Five steps: create the vault, wire the profile, seed five notes, let agents write back, run the recall test.
Ten good notes change tomorrow’s first reply — you don’t need a library first.
Agents maintain the vault; you don’t write markdown.
Never put credentials in memory — exports strip them for a reason.
The Hermes memory setup, in five steps
Create the vault. A folder of markdown notes — Obsidian is free and it’s the provider I’d use. Empty is fine.
Point Hermes at it. Wire the vault into your profile so the agent reads it before working and writes to it after finishing.
Seed five notes. Who you are and what the business is; a note per active project or client; your writing voice; a decision log; a daily log the agents will fill.
Let the agents write. This is the step people miss — you don’t maintain the vault, they do. Every session should end with something written back.
Run the recall test. Ask “what did I work on last week?” Real dates and real specifics mean the loop is closed. Generic waffle means step two isn’t wired.
That’s genuinely the whole setup. Ten good notes will change tomorrow’s first reply — you don’t need a hundred before it’s worth doing.
Why bother: the blank-session problem
Without persistent memory, every session is a first date. You re-explain yourself, your business and your projects hundreds of times a year, and the output comes back sounding like anyone’s.
An agent reading a vault of your real words writes like you and answers from your actual history. The problem was never the model — it was the empty memory.
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What to put in, and what to leave out
Put in
Leave out
Business facts, offers, clients, preferences
Anything you’d regret an agent repeating
Decisions and the why behind them
Secrets and credentials — memory is not a password manager
Writing-voice samples
Huge raw dumps — distil, don’t hoard
What worked and what failed
Stale plans you’ve abandoned — prune them
And capture feeds it automatically once wired: voice notes transcribed and filed, session summaries written back, even wearable notes exported in. The vault fills up from work you were doing anyway.
After the setup: keep it honest
Audit weekly with /journey — the timeline of every skill and memory, where you edit or delete anything wrong.
Export weekly — the vault is the one part of your setup that can’t be rebuilt from scratch.
Watch that it stays distilled: a bloated vault costs context on every read. The memory budget guide covers that.
Create a markdown vault, point your Hermes profile at it, seed five notes about your business, let the agents write back after every session, then verify with a recall question.
How many notes do I need to start?
Five to ten good ones. The difference shows in the first reply the next day — you don’t need a library first.
Do I write the memory notes myself?
Mostly no. You seed the first few; the agents create and update notes from then on. That’s what makes it compound.
How do I know the setup worked?
Ask the agent what you worked on last week. Real dates and specifics mean it’s reading the vault; generic answers mean the wiring isn’t connected.
Should credentials go in memory?
Never. Memory is business context, not secrets — keys live in runtime config, and exports strip credentials for exactly this reason.
What maintenance does it need?
A weekly /journey audit and a weekly export. Prune stale plans so the vault stays distilled rather than bloated.
The bottom line on Hermes memory setup
Hermes memory setup is five steps and one habit: vault, wiring, five seed notes, agents writing back, and a recall test to prove it — then weekly audits and exports to keep it honest. Do it once and you never explain your business to a blank session again.
