ITRAC
Agentic AI
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Agentic AI — Day 7

What you're installing

Complete this before the session. It isn't timed and isn't part of the exercise itself — the in-class exercise assumes Hermes is already installed and working on your machine.

If you hit a blocker you can't clear before the session, come to class anyway and flag it at the start — there won't be time to debug installs during the exercise itself.

Hermes is a local AI agent runtime with a CLI. In the session, you'll use it to run a small network of independent agents that talk to each other over a real agent-to-agent protocol. This guide only covers getting Hermes installed and confirmed working — the agent network itself gets set up in class.

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Agentic AI — Day 7

Windows users: install WSL first

Hermes runs inside a Linux environment. If you're on Windows 11, install WSL before doing anything else:
  1. Open PowerShell as Administrator.
  2. Run wsl --install.
  3. Restart when prompted.
  4. Open the Ubuntu terminal that now appears in your Start menu and finish its first-run setup (username/password).

Do the rest of this guide inside that Ubuntu/WSL terminal, not in PowerShell.

macOS and Linux users can skip straight to the next step.

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Agentic AI — Day 7

Install Hermes

In your terminal:
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash
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Agentic AI — Day 7

Run setup

hermes setup

The wizard will ask you a few questions. Choose:

  • Quick Setup (Nous Portal) — free OAuth login, no API keys needed. You'll need a free Nous Portal account; the wizard will walk you through creating one if you don't have one.
  • Model selection — a free model works fine for this exercise. If you already have an API key for a model provider and want to use it, that's fine too and will generally give better responses, but it isn't required.
  • Terminal backend — choose Local.
  • Messaging platforms — skip this (choose none).
  • Configure the CLI — agree.
  • Tools selection for the CLI — leave the defaults selected.

If you ever need to change any of these choices later, you can re-run hermes setup at any time.

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Agentic AI — Day 7

Confirm it works

Start an interactive chat with the default profile:
hermes

Ask it anything — e.g. "what's 12 times 8?" — and confirm you get a reply. Then exit (Ctrl+D or type exit).

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Agentic AI — Day 7

Checklist before Day 7

If any box is unchecked, try the step again or note exactly where it failed so it can be resolved quickly at the start of class.

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