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.
Prime Intellect's recursive-language-model harness — a persistent IPython kernel is the only tool, sub-agents are function calls.
Drops fixed tool schemas and context compaction: the agent writes programs over its own context, and can CRUD its own prompts, skills and sub-agents mid-run.
| Hermes Agent | Prime Agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Open source | Open source |
| Pricing | open source | open source |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Languages | Any language | Any language |
| Install | curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash | curl -fsSL https://app.primeintellect.ai/prime-agent/install.sh | sh |
| 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. Prime Agent: Prime Intellect's recursive-language-model harness — a persistent IPython kernel is the only tool, sub-agents are function calls.
Hermes Agent can run on your own infrastructure. Prime Agent can run on your own infrastructure.
Hermes Agent is open source (open source). Prime Agent 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-prime-agent