Hermes Agent Blank Slate mode

Hermes Agent's existing onboarding paths give you a working agent loaded with capability. Quick Setup uses the Nous Portal with free OAuth and no API keys, while Full Setup makes you select every tool but bring your own keys ^[1]. Both leave you with an agent that, by default, can reach the network, execute code, see images, remember across sessions, delegate to subagents, and run scheduled jobs. Blank Slate inverts that contract entirely: it boots with everything off except provider & model, File Operations, and Terminal ^[1].

Concretely, that means web, browser, code execution, vision, memory, delegation, cron, skills, plugins, and MCP all stay disabled, and so do quieter background behaviors like compression, checkpoints, smart routing, and memory capture ^[1]. The result is an agent that can read and write files on disk and run shell commands, and literally nothing else until you say otherwise. Where a default agent answers 'what can I turn off?', Blank Slate answers 'what do I actually need to turn on?' — a small framing change that shifts the default safety posture from permissive to restrictive.

The feature that makes Blank Slate more than a cosmetic preset is how it persists. Toolsets in Hermes Agent are logical groupings of individual tools that get enabled or disabled per platform; the documented set includes web, search, terminal, file, browser, vision, image_gen, skills, memory, cronjob, code_execution, delegation, and messaging, among others ^[2]. Blank Slate writes an explicit platform_toolsets.cli list of what's allowed plus an agent.disabled_toolsets list of what's off, rather than relying on implicit defaults ^[1].

That distinction is load-bearing because of update behavior. With implicit defaults, a new release can introduce a toolset that ships enabled, silently expanding what your agent can do. By pinning the surface explicitly, Blank Slate guarantees that 'nothing you did not choose ever loads,' and crucially, that holds even after running hermes update ^[1]. Configuration lives durably in ~/.hermes/config.yaml for non-secret settings and ~/.hermes/.env for secrets, with Blank Slate using provider auth only ^[1]. The payoff is twofold: a genuinely reduced attack surface for security-sensitive deployments where nothing touches the network unless you add web or browser tools, and drift-free, reproducible team configurations where one pinned toolset can be replicated across every machine and survive upgrades ^[1].

Blank Slate reads less like a surprise and more like Nous Research closing a loop the community had already opened. On r/hermesagent, a widely-upvoted post argued that Hermes was drifting toward 'enabling so many tools and skills by default,' which created 'noise, unpredictability, and makes testing harder' — and a top comment in that thread explicitly asked for 'a minimal dev mode with less default tool/skill noise' before Blank Slate shipped. A separate, even more popular retrospective from a long-time user converged on the same lesson independently: they described turning off all third-party memory providers, leaning on Hermes' native markdown memory system, and cutting their agent profiles down — a manual 'strip it down' workflow that Blank Slate now offers as a first-class mode.

The reception once it shipped validates that demand. A new r/hermesagent post called Blank Slate 'what Hermes should be since the beginning,' describing 'Hermes naked. No tools. Just the bare minimum to operate.' Across X, developers framed it as one of the better feature decisions they'd seen in a while, precisely because it answers the bloat complaint rather than adding to it. The one notable dissent — a user questioning whether a stripped-down agent framework is worth using over raw API access — is the natural edge of the same conversation: if you strip an agent far enough, where's the line between a minimal agent and just calling the model directly?