What Are Profiles

Hermes’s profiles feature provides a set of mutually isolated runtime environments. Each profile has its own configuration, keys, persona, memory, sessions, skills, scheduled tasks, and state database. In other words, it doesn’t split roles within a single session — it creates multiple independent Hermes spaces on the same device.

The direct result of this isolation: different purposes, identities, and users don’t pollute each other’s context. You can dedicate one profile to yourself, one to family, one to friends, or split them by project, role, or workflow.

How It Works

After creating a profile, Hermes automatically generates a dedicated command entry point for it. For example, after creating a profile named coder, you can directly use:

• coder chat
• coder setup
• coder gateway start

This means a profile isn’t just a config folder — it’s an independent agent unit you can launch and manage directly.

Profile Management Commands

Creating a Profile

Listing and Switching

Ways to Use a Profile

Method 1: command alias (auto-generated)

After creating a profile, Hermes automatically generates a same-named command under ~/.local/bin/:

Method 2: the -p flag

Viewing Details

Example output:

Importing and Exporting

Deleting a Profile

:::warning

Deletion is irreversible — it stops the gateway, removes services, and deletes all data.

:::

Profile File Structure

Each profile is stored at ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/, containing:

What Scenarios It Fits

1. Dedicated Assistants for Different People

The most direct use case: creating an independent Hermes for each family member or friend on the same device. Everyone gets their own configuration, memory, and usage habits — no need to understand the underlying operations details.

2. Multi-Project Isolation

If you maintain multiple projects at once, put each project in a different profile. That way model settings, skills, session history, and cron tasks never interfere with each other.

3. Multiple Roles in Parallel

You can make one profile your personal assistant, another a coding assistant, and yet another a research assistant. Their behavior styles, plugins, memory, and task state can all be configured independently.

4. Experimentation and Backups

When you want to test a new configuration or new skills, or preserve the current state as a rollback-able copy, --clone-all is ideal. It clones the entire environment, and you can keep experimenting on the new profile.

What Problems It Solves

Profiles mainly solve the problem of “a single agent can’t be split enough, context gets mixed up easily, and configurations are hard to isolate.”

Specifically, it reduces:

• Session histories getting mixed together
• Memory conflicts between different users
• API keys and model configurations overwriting each other
• Scheduled tasks, skills, and plugins interfering with one another
• One agent being forced to play multiple identities without clear boundaries

So profiles are more like an “isolated multi-tenant” capability: on the same machine, you can run multiple Hermes instances simultaneously without them interfering with each other.

How It Differs from Subagents

Profiles and subagents are not the same thing.

• profiles: long-term independent environments, suited to multiple people, identities, and projects
• subagent: a temporary work unit dispatched to execute a single task, suited to parallel research, task splitting, and quick collaboration

You can think of profiles as “separate rooms for each person” and subagents as “people temporarily sent out to do errands.”

A Practical Way to Think About It

If you want one device to serve different people at the same time, with each person feeling like they have their own dedicated AI assistant, profiles are the foundational capability Hermes provides. It turns complex multi-user usage into a manageable, isolated, replicable structure.

That’s also one of its most valuable differentiators compared to many solutions that only emphasize single-session workflows.