Antbase/Documentation

Hermes Agent Integration

Hermes Agent is an open-source autonomous coding CLI by Nous Research. It's OpenAI-compatible, so it drops straight onto ANT for intelligent routing across every coding task. For the full agent overview, see Agents > Hermes or the Hermes landing page.

Automatic Setup

Run this command in your terminal. It opens a browser device-auth flow, then writes your Hermes config automatically — the API key is delivered straight back to the CLI, so there's zero copy-paste.

curl -fsSL https://antbase.ai/hermes.sh | bash

Done!

The installer writes ~/.hermes/config.yaml with ANT as the model provider. Run hermes to start.

Manual Configuration

Prefer to configure it yourself? Create an API key at antbase.ai/app (keys start with ant_), then write your ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

# Antbase — intelligent AI routing (https://antbase.ai)
# base_url is set explicitly so Hermes calls Antbase directly.
model:
  default: ant:coder
  provider: custom
  base_url: https://antbase.ai/v1
  api_key: ant_your_key_here
  context_length: 200000

Always set base_url. When base_url is present, Hermes ignores the provider field and calls that endpoint directly. This is the robust path.

Without it, a bare provider: custom can fall through to OpenRouter if OPENROUTER_API_KEY is set in your environment — a known Hermes bug.

Antbase is OpenAI-compatible for Hermes — the endpoint is https://antbase.ai/v1 (Chat Completions).

Usage

Once configured, just start the agent — ANT handles routing transparently:

# Start Hermes Agent
hermes

To change which virtual model handles your requests, set a different model.default in ~/.hermes/config.yaml — for example ant:best for maximum quality or ant:free for zero-cost models.

Virtual Models

Set any of these as your model.default:

ant:coder

Recommended default — tuned for coding tasks

ant:auto

Smart routing — ANT picks the best model for each prompt

ant:best

Maximum quality — complex reasoning, architecture

ant:fast

Optimized for speed — quick queries, autocomplete

ant:free

Zero-cost — uses free-tier provider models only

ant:reasoning

Thinking tasks — extended reasoning models

Full list of virtual models, weights, and examples: Virtual Models. You can also create custom model groups with Nests.

Troubleshooting

Hermes calls OpenRouter instead of Antbase

Make sure base_url: https://antbase.ai/v1 is set in ~/.hermes/config.yaml. With base_url present, Hermes ignores the provider field and calls Antbase directly. If it still routes elsewhere, unset OPENROUTER_API_KEY in your environment.

401 Unauthorized errors

Check that your API key is correct in config.yaml and starts with ant_. You can regenerate keys from the dashboard.

Where do I see routing traces?

Every request is logged with a per-request routing trace in the dashboard — you can see which model handled each call and why.

For more, see the full Hermes agent guide.