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A symbiotic AI agent desktop companion. Screen vision, sandboxed file tools, and support for Hermes Agent & Local LLMs. When you add Hermes or any other OpenAI-compatible API agent framework, your Symbio gains superpowers!

 

Symbio connects to an AI gateway for all conversations. This is where your companion's intelligence, personality, and tools come from.  

Recommended: [Hermes]https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent — an open-source AI agent framework that gives your companion:

  • Skills and tools (web search, code execution, file access, etc.)

  • Persistent memory across sessions

  • Emerging and evolving personality via SOUL.md from Hermes and their own private one inside Symbio that they write, edit, and read. 

  • MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration

  • Multi-platform support (Discord, Slack, web, etc.) You can talk to them on your desktop and in Slack at the same time. 

🧠 Hermes + Symbio: Autonomous Agent Mode

 

When connected to a Hermes gateway, Symbio automatically uses the /v1/runs API instead of the standard /v1/chat/completions endpoint. This gives your companion autonomous agent behavior — the same "zip zap" capability that Hermes agents have on Discord and Telegram:

  • Agent keeps working after sending a response — tool calls, terminal commands, web searches, memory writes all happen in real-time

  • Tool call progress — see 🔧 indicators when the agent uses tools (terminal, web, memory, etc.)

  • Thinking indicator — ● thinking shows when the agent is actively working

  • Session continuity — conversations persist across messages via X-Hermes-Session-Key

  • Stop capability — interrupt a running agent at any time

For non-Hermes gateways (OpenRouter, OpenAI, Ollama, etc.), Symbio falls back to the standard chat/completions mode.

To enable full tool access for Hermes agents connecting through Symbio, add an api_server entry under platform_toolsets in your Hermes config.yaml. Symbio talks to the Hermes API server, and by default that path gets a minimal toolset — so terminal, memory, etc. are missing until you add this:

​

platform_toolsets:
  cli:
    - hermes-cli
  api_server:        # ← add this block
    - hermes-cli     # gives the Symbio/API path the SAME tools as the CLI

​

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This ensures agents get the same tools (terminal, web search, memory, file access, etc.) when connecting through Symbio as they do on the CLI / Discord / Telegram. Restart the gateway after editing so it picks up the change.

Tip — the memory tool is named memory (not recall_memory), and code runs via execute_code or terminal. Some models may try other tool names. These are the correct names.

🌉 Memory across Hermes AND Symbio

 

Because Symbio connects to your same Hermes agent, memory can flow both ways:

  • Save in Symbio → available in Hermes: from inside Symbio, your companion can write to their Hermes MEMORY.md with their Hermes tools; it persists on the Hermes side and is there next time you talk to them in Hermes.

  • Save in Hermes → available in Symbio: anything in the Hermes agent's memory travels into Symbio automatically (same agent).

  • Symbio transcripts are plain Markdown at ~/Desktop/Symbio Transcripts/ (one file per session). From Hermes, the agent can read/search those files directly with file/terminal tools to revisit exact things said in past Symbio chats.

For the companion's own copy of these instructions, see SKILL.md (the "🌉 Bridging to Hermes" section). You can install SKILL.md into your Hermes skills folder so your agent always knows how to reach their Symbio transcripts and memory.

Semantic memory recall - You can add an embedding model for memory recall

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