Claude already made most of us superheroes. The part nobody talks about enough is what happens next — once the model can carry the hard work, the job stops being "write the code" and starts being "decide what gets handed off, and to what." That's the whole pitch behind Hermes Agent.
Hermes Agent is Nous Research's open-source orchestrator. It runs its own reasoning loop, its own memory, its own context window — separate from whatever coding CLI it's directing — and one of its first-party skills is handing coding work off to Claude Code. Instead of you sitting in front of Claude Code driving every step, Hermes sits above it, deciding what to delegate and when. It reaches Claude (and a few hundred other models, if you want them) through Nous Portal, its unified gateway.
If you are like me since Claude Code came out my Macbook is on 5% battery with the lid open. So the obvious move is to run Hermes Agent on a computer that never sleeps. So close your MacBook, spend some time outside and the work will still be happening. Hermes runs in a Virtual Machine (VM) instead of your laptop. By orchestrating Claude Code on a box that doesn't care whether my laptop lid is up or down and frees you up to focus on the larger issues than the 2AM Coding Sessions. That one change bought back real hours with my family that used to be "just let me finish this one thing" hours.
It wasn't free — I watched my Claude usage costs spike once an agent could keep working without me there to notice. That's a big enough topic that it's getting its own post rather than a paragraph here.
The VM isn't really the point. The point is that once an agent can run without you babysitting it, your job as a developer moves up a level — from writing the code to designing the system that decides what gets written, by what, and when to step in. That's agentic engineering, and it's where I think the whole industry is headed. Hermes Agent, running somewhere other than my laptop, is just the most concrete version of that shift I've made so far.
I'm covering the actual setup — installing Hermes, wiring it to Nous Portal, pointing it at Claude Code — in a video instead of here. This post was the why; that one's the how. And the Claude cost spike gets its own post, because it deserves a real look rather than a footnote.
