I've been using the NousResearch Hermes agent for the past couple of weeks and have to say it's been really good. I tend to hit multiple instances (and accounts)of Claude across three or four machines (between work and personal) and having a competent agent with constant state has been good for memorializing and organizing important info (directly into Obsidian, too), doing some amount of research and planning and it's also been helpful working out a lot of bugs with my burgeoning home automation setup. It's also been helpful dealing with management of several miscellaneous servers in the house, as it's definitely both faster and a better documenter than I am.
I have it running on a cheap VPS and it's fairly locked down. Especially with all of the self-reinforcement learning and skill development it's been improving its usefulness and, overall, I've been pretty pleased. Surprised even, if I'm being honest.
how does Hermes compare to SOTA?