Hermes Agent Hits #1 on OpenRouter With 271B Tokens Processed — 140K GitHub Stars, Self-Evolving Skill Files, and FTS5 Cross-Session Memory Make It the Most Used Open-Source Agent

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Nous Research's Hermes Agent overtook OpenClaw as the most-used AI agent on OpenRouter on May 6, processing 271 billion tokens — 224B daily versus OpenClaw's 186B. At 140K+ GitHub stars in under three months with ~1,000 contributors, it runs persistently on local hardware (RTX, DGX Spark, VPS). The self-evolving architecture is the key differentiator: after completing complex tasks, Hermes generates skill files (markdown procedures) that are loaded and refined on similar future tasks. Combined with FTS5 SQLite cross-session memory and Honcho dialectic user modeling, it accumulates domain expertise over time. Ships with 40+ bundled skills covering MLOps, GitHub workflows, and more.