We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Hermes Agent Challenge! Over the past few weeks, the DEV community dove headfirst into one of the most exciting open-source agentic systems on the scene, and the submissions absolutely delivered.
The range of what people built and wrote left us genuinely impressed — Hermes' memory architecture got a thorough cognitive-science breakdown, the cost curve of a self-improving agent got stress-tested in production, someone built a full immune system for stress-testing AI agent safety, and a Linux desktop HAL was shipped entirely by AI agents. These are just a few of the standout submissions that made judging genuinely hard.
Now, without further ado, let's celebrate our winners! 🎉
Build With Hermes Agent Winners 🏆
From an offline-first emergency response platform to a 25-agent legislative simulation, the Build submissions pushed Hermes into genuinely ambitious territory. What stood out across the board was how purposefully each project used Hermes' agentic capabilities — not as a wrapper around a chat model, but as the actual load-bearing infrastructure. Parallel task delegation, persistent memory, scheduled autonomy, and model-agnostic routing all showed up in real, working builds.
Building an Offline-First Bushfire Response Platform With Hermes Agent
Hermes Agent Challenge Submission: Build With Hermes Agent
I Built a 25-Agent Polish Parliament That Drafts Bills With Real Legal Citations
Hermes Agent Challenge Submission: Build With Hermes Agent
Skills are Prompts. Here's how Hermes Apprentice turns them into weights
Hermes Agent Challenge Submission: Build With Hermes Agent
I Made My AI Models Argue, Then Let Hermes Be the Judge
Write About Hermes Agent Winners 🏆
The Write submissions gave us useful breakdowns and genuine perspective. The strongest pieces ranged from practical setup guides to sharp critical arguments — about the self-trust issue baked into Hermes' skill architecture, what persistent memory actually changes about the developer experience, and when local agents earn their complexity. Whether you're just getting started with Hermes or already running it in production, there's something here for you to sink your teeth into.
Two Local-Agent Philosophies: Where Hermes Earns Its Design, and Where the Tradeoffs Invert
Hermes Agent Challenge Submission
Nous Research Hermes Agent: Setup and Tutorial Guide
Prizes
All eight winners will each receive:
- $125 USD
- DEV++ Membership
- Exclusive DEV Badge
All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.
What's Next?
Check out the June Solstice Game Jam happening now:
Thank you once more to everyone who participated.
Happy coding! 💙