The fastest Hermes setup in the world right now is not a tutorial, a prompt pack or a weekend of tinkering — it is somebody else's file. Since Nous Research shipped its 13 August 2026 update, a Hermes backup import can take an exported agent file and turn it into a fully working agent on your machine in minutes. I have been playing with this since it landed, and I think import is the half of the update that genuinely changes how people will build agents from here.
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Export gets the headlines because it is the dramatic half — your agent's whole identity in one file. But export on its own is just a safety net. Import is the door. It is what lets that file become a working agent on a new machine, a teammate's machine, or the machine of someone on the other side of the world who has never met you. That last one is where things get properly interesting, so in this guide I will cover what import actually does, the three ways I am already using it, and exactly what to do the moment you import a profile someone else built.
What a Hermes Backup Import Actually Does
The mechanics are refreshingly boring. You take an exported agent file — I have broken down exactly what lives inside one in my Hermes export guide — move it to any machine running Hermes, and run the import command. The agent comes back fully set up: persona, skills, memory, cron jobs, plugins, themes. Not a starting point you then spend a day configuring. The finished thing. If you want the exact usage, my Hermes backup command reference covers the how; this page is about the why.
The design choice that makes everything else in this article possible is this: keys never travel. When an agent is exported, Hermes strips API keys and credentials automatically. Whoever imports the file adds their own keys on their side. The agent's brain arrives — the tuning, the memory, the workflows — but private access does not. You can never burn the sharer's accounts, and they can never burn yours.
That one decision turns import from a personal recovery tool into a sharing mechanism. Without it, sending someone your agent file would be like posting them your wallet. With it, you are sending the recipe and keeping your kitchen.
Use Case One: Importing Your Own File
The obvious use first, and I will keep it short because it has its own page. You export on machine A, import on machine B, add your keys, and your agent is home — same persona, same memory, same schedules. That covers a new laptop, a second machine, and recovery after a failure. If that is what brought you here, my Hermes backup restore walkthrough covers the recovery scenario properly, and my Hermes backup guide covers the habit that makes it possible. Done. Now the fun stuff.
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Use Case Two: Your Team's File — the Same-Day Upgrade
Here is the scenario that made me sit up. Someone on your team builds an agent that absolutely nails one task. Product descriptions in the house voice. The weekly client report, formatted the way clients actually read it. A research workflow tuned over weeks until the output stopped needing edits. Before this update, that value was trapped on one machine — and spreading it meant a long screen-share while everyone else copied settings across by hand and still ended up with slightly different agents.
Now the setup is the file. The person who built it exports once. Every teammate imports, adds their own keys, and runs the same tuned agent — the same day. No drift, no transcription errors, no mysteries about why one copy behaves differently. For a small agency, that is transformative: the agent one person quietly perfected for client research becomes the whole team's agent by the afternoon.
And because keys never travel, nobody is sharing access to anything. Five people importing one file means five people running the same brain against their own accounts. The tuning is communal; the access stays personal.
Use Case Three: Community Profiles and the End of the Blank Page
Teams are the warm-up. The real shift is what happens once agents are single, safe files: people start passing them around like templates. Someone shares a research agent profile that produces genuinely publishable briefs. Someone shares a content agent tuned for newsletters. You import it, add your keys, adjust it to fit your business — and you have skipped the months of tuning the sharer already did.
You stop starting every agent from a blank page and start from someone else's finished work. I have written before about the Hermes agent Paperclip — agents with real, distinctive character — and portable profiles mean agents like that stop being things you read about and start being things you can actually run.
Community members are already talking about meta-agents that manage whole collections of profiles — an agent that curates your agents. I want to be straight with you: that is early conversation, a plan rather than a shipped feature. But the direction is unmistakable. Agents are going the way websites went — from hand-coded, to templates, to ecosystems built on other people's starting points. The near future looks like this: when you want an agent, you will import one. Building from scratch becomes the exception.
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After You Import a Shared Profile: My Checklist
Importing a Hermes backup from someone else is not quite plug-and-play, and it should not be. Here is what I do the moment a shared profile lands:
- Read the persona. You have effectively just hired someone, so read the persona and find out who — the tone, the priorities, the rules the sharer baked in. Ten minutes here saves hours of confused output later.
- Review and swap the memory. The honest bit nobody mentions: the memory that arrives is the sharer's record, not yours. A serious sharer will curate and trim before exporting, but you should still review what arrived, clear what is irrelevant, and load in your own business context. My guide to the best memory for a Hermes agent covers what good context looks like.
- Re-key everything. The skills arrive pointing at nothing, because keys never travel. Connect each one to your own accounts with your own API keys — a natural audit, since you see exactly what the agent can touch before it touches anything.
- Adjust the schedules. Cron jobs arrive set to the sharer's rhythm and timezone. Shift them to yours, and drop any that make no sense for your setup.
Then one more thing before an imported agent gets near real work: I test it. Imported profiles get judged on real tasks before I trust them — my Goldie Bench habit applies to other people's agents exactly as it applies to new models. Only after a profile earns it does it get a slot in my Agent OS alongside the agents I built myself.
The Trust Rule
Common sense, stated plainly: only import files from people you trust. A profile is not a document you read — it configures an agent that will act with whatever permissions you grant it. The key-stripping design protects both sides' accounts, but the persona, instructions and scheduled behaviour are all the sharer's work, and you are choosing to run them. Review before you run. It is the same rule you would apply to any software from the internet, applied to agents.
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The Newcomer Edge
One thing worth saying to anyone who feels late to Hermes: this feature is days old, which means the playing field just tilted in your favour. Every early adopter — me included — built their agents from nothing, mistake by mistake. The person who starts Hermes this weekend gets to begin from shared profiles that already work, an edge none of us had. The starting line moved closer. Late has rarely looked this good.
What a Hermes Backup Import Brings — and What It Never Does
| Part of the agent | Travels in the file? | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Persona | Yes | The character and rules arrive exactly as tuned — read them first. |
| Skills | Yes | The workflows arrive ready; you point them at your own accounts. |
| Memory | Yes | It is the sharer's record — review it, then swap in your own context. |
| Cron jobs | Yes | Schedules arrive intact; shift them to your timezone and rhythm. |
| Plugins and themes | Yes | The working environment comes along, not just the brain. |
| API keys and credentials | No | Stripped automatically on export — you add your own, and the sharer's access never leaves their machine. |
Hermes Backup Import: FAQ
Can I import someone else's Hermes agent?
Yes — that is the point. As long as the file was exported from Hermes and you are running Hermes, their agent's full setup becomes yours: persona, skills, memory, schedules, the lot. You add your own keys and it runs against your accounts, not theirs.
Do their API keys come with the file?
No. Exports strip keys and credentials automatically, every time — it is not an option the sharer has to remember to tick. You supply your own keys after importing, which is precisely why passing files around is safe in the first place.
Does importing overwrite my existing agent?
Honest answer: check the current documentation for merge behaviour before you import onto a machine that already runs an agent you care about. The update is new, and I would rather send you to the docs than guess at edge cases. What I do regardless: export my own agent first, so whatever happens, my setup exists as a file too.
Can I sell or share my Hermes setup?
Sharing works today — export the file, send it, and the recipient imports it with their own keys. As for selling, people in the community are already discussing shareable profiles as products, but that is discussion, not a shipped marketplace. If profiles follow the path templates took, tuned agents becoming paid products feels like a natural next step.
What should I check before running an imported profile?
Four things: the persona, so you know how it will behave; the memory, which is the sharer's record until you replace it; the skills and the permissions you are about to grant them; and the schedules. And only import from people you trust in the first place.
My Verdict on Hermes Backup Import
Export made agents safe to lose. Import makes them worth sharing — and the second thing is bigger. A Hermes backup import turns months of someone else's tuning into your Tuesday afternoon setup, whether that someone is you on a second machine, a teammate with the client-report agent, or a stranger who shared a brilliant research profile. Keys stay put, brains travel, and the blank page stops being the default.
This page is one part of a series — the full picture, from the export habit through to disaster recovery, lives in my Hermes agent backup and restore hub. But if you only act on one page of it, act on this one: find a profile worth importing, run the checklist above, and feel how strange it is to skip the hard part.
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