Memory

Agents have two kinds of memory, and the difference matters:

• Session memory — what the agent knows within one conversation. It vanishes when the session ends.
• Persistent memory — facts the agent writes down and recalls across sessions, days apart. In Hermes this lives in ~/.hermes/memories/.

Persistent memory is what makes an agent feel like it “knows you” — your project, your preferences, decisions you made last week.

Providers

The store behind persistent memory can be swapped. Hermes supports more than one memory provider (for example, Honcho is one option). You don’t need the details today — just the idea that memory is a pluggable component, not magic.

Why it matters: without persistent memory, every session starts from zero. With it, the agent compounds context over time — the difference between a tool and a colleague.

Try it: in the Hermes dashboard (localhost:9119), open the Memory screen, tell the agent a fact about a project, end the session, start a new one, and ask it back.

Next: Spec-driven development — the method that ties all three platforms together.