Memory system

Hermes maintains persistent memory across sessions. Unlike chat history, memory is curated: the agent decides what's worth keeping.

What gets remembered

• Your role, preferences, and working style.
• Project facts you mention repeatedly.
• Decisions and outcomes from past tasks.
• Tool usage patterns that worked well.

Where it lives

~/.hermes/memory/

All local. No cloud sync unless you configure it.

Viewing memory

In a session:

/memory

Or search:

/memory search vitepress

Guiding what Hermes remembers

Tell it explicitly:

Remember that I always want VitePress builds run before committing docs changes.

Or correct stale memory:

Forget the old project path. The hermes docs are now at
~/Projects/FDE/hermes-course/hermes-mastery-docs.

Memory vs. context files

Use both:

• Context files for static project facts you want always loaded.
• Memory for dynamic preferences Hermes learns over time.

Example: AGENTS.md says "this is a VitePress project." Memory learns "user prefers short commit messages" after a few sessions.

Cross-session recall

Hermes uses FTS5 full-text search over past sessions plus LLM summarization to pull relevant history into new conversations. This is how it "remembers" that you fixed a similar bug last week.

Privacy note

Memory can contain sensitive information from past sessions. Review periodically:

ls ~/.hermes/memory/

Delete what you don't want kept. See Privacy & offline data.

Next: Skills system.