HHermes Explained

Memory

Personal Wiki

A human-readable knowledge base connected to Hermes workflows and memory habits.

Importance 4/53 backlinks1 source refs

Personal Wiki

What it is

A human-readable knowledge base connected to Hermes workflows and memory habits.

In plain terms

Picture an encyclopedia that quietly rewrites its own entries and cross-references every time new information comes in, instead of just piling up fresh articles disconnected from the old ones. That is the personal wiki: a folder of plain markdown pages Hermes keeps cross-linked and current, so a question asked two years apart lands on a compiled answer instead of a cold trail through scattered notes.

Why it matters

Curated memory gets a human-readable home in a personal wiki instead of living only as opaque records an agent queries on demand — pages a person can actually browse, edit, and cross-reference directly. That readability matters for trust: a user can audit what Hermes ‘knows’ about them rather than taking retrieval accuracy on faith. It pairs naturally with session search, since a wiki entry often starts life as something worth pulling back out of an old conversation.

How it works

The bundled llm-wiki skill (skills/research/llm-wiki/SKILL.md) splits the wiki into three layers: an immutable raw/ folder for source material, agent-maintained entity, concept, and comparison pages, and a SCHEMA.md that fixes naming conventions and a tag taxonomy so pages stay consistent over time. Before touching anything in a session, Hermes orients itself by reading SCHEMA.md, index.md, and the last 20-30 entries of log.md, which heads off duplicate pages and missed cross-references. Ingesting a source means saving it under raw/, checking index.md for existing pages on the same topic, then writing or updating pages with at least two outbound wikilinks and frontmatter noting confidence and provenance. A lint pass can separately flag orphaned pages, broken links, and stale or contradictory content, and the whole folder doubles as an Obsidian vault.

A concrete example

Someone pastes a link to a new research paper into chat. Hermes:

  1. Saves the article under raw/papers/ with a source URL and content hash
  2. Checks index.md and finds a related concept page already exists
  3. Updates that page with the paper’s findings, adds two wikilinks, and bumps its updated date
  4. Appends the change to log.md and index.md Months later, asking “how does this compare to the older approach” pulls up the same page instantly, already cross-referenced, instead of making Hermes re-read everything from scratch.

How it connects

This note belongs to the Memory family. Its closest neighboring concepts are: Session Search, Knowledge Curation, Agent Runtime, Personal OS.

Source evidence

  • vendor/hermes-agent/agent/memory_manager.py:505-515#MemoryManager.prefetch_all — Verified Source Map evidence for MemoryManager. MemoryManager calls prefetch on each registered provider in order, skips empty results, isolates individual provider failures, and merges the remaining text.

Workflows

  • No first-pass workflow mapping yet; this concept still appears in the vault graph through articles and source evidence.
  • Building a Personal AI System with Hermes, Local Models, Automation, and a Shared Knowledge Base
  • Six Hermes Use Cases for a More Intentional Personal Operating System