Both are open source harness options with comparable terms, so the choice comes down to which model of the problem you prefer — compare the descriptions below rather than the licence.
Self-improving agent from Nous Research — writes its own skills from experience and carries them forward.
The learning loop is the point: it creates skills after complex tasks and searches its own past sessions. Runs anywhere from a $5 VPS to Modal or Vercel Sandbox.
Everything is a plugin — the model adapter, the tool registry, the sandbox and the agent loop itself are all swappable.
Web UI first — `dsh web` serves on 127.0.0.1:3080 rather than taking over the terminal. Built on Cordis. Still a developer preview: DeepSeek warns of compatibility-breaking changes, so pin the version.
| Hermes Agent | DeepSeek Harness | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Open source | Open source |
| Pricing | open source | open source |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Languages | Any language | TypeScript |
| Install | curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash | npx @deepseek-ai/dsh web |
| Keys required | None | None |
Both are open source harness options with comparable terms, so the choice comes down to which model of the problem you prefer — compare the descriptions below rather than the licence. Hermes Agent: Self-improving agent from Nous Research — writes its own skills from experience and carries them forward. DeepSeek Harness: Everything is a plugin — the model adapter, the tool registry, the sandbox and the agent loop itself are all swappable.
Hermes Agent can run on your own infrastructure. DeepSeek Harness can run on your own infrastructure.
Hermes Agent is open source (open source). DeepSeek Harness is open source (open source).
Every page here answers to Accept: text/markdown and returns the same content at roughly a tenth the tokens. No separate site, no toggle — same URL.
curl -s -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://newagent.build/compare/hermes-agent-vs-deepseek-harness