Hermes Co-Founder on Building an AI Agent That Improves Itself | Karan Malhotra

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Karan co-founded Nous Research, the company behind Hermes, the #1 personal agent and AI app overall on OpenRouter. I found him incredibly down to earth as we discussed why open-source AI must win, how Hermes gets better the more you use it, and even a live demo of how Hermes can mod your favorite childhood games.

Karan and I talked about:

(00:00) How Hermes differs from Claude Code and Codex

(02:20) Why every AI model now sounds exactly the same

(11:16) How to stop AI from saying “you’re absolutely right”

(15:16) How Hermes creates skills without bloating its context

(16:40) The open vs. closed-source debate on AI safety

(23:40) Using one Kanban board for humans and AI agents

(26:45) Demo: Rebuilding a childhood Sonic world with Hermes

(36:07) How two Discord friends built a self-improving agent

(42:40) How Hermes became its own biggest contributor

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📌 Get the takeaways: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/hermes-co-founder-on-building-an-ai-agent-that-improves-itself-karan-malhotra

Where to find Karan:

X: https://x.com/karan4d

Website: https://www.karan4d.com/

Hermes Agent: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

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