Your Hermes agent is no longer stuck on one machine. As of this week, Hermes export turns weeks of careful tuning — the persona, the skills, the memory, the schedules — into a single file you can copy, store, move or hand to someone else. On 13 August 2026, Nous Research shipped an update with two new commands, export and import, and I think it quietly changes what these agents actually are.
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I run Hermes every day for my business, and the thing I kept worrying about in the background was embarrassingly simple: everything I had built lived on one laptop. This update ends that. In this guide I want to go deep on the export side specifically — what it is, exactly what ends up inside the file, and the one design decision that makes the file safe to share.
The problem: a brilliant agent, trapped on one machine
A good Hermes agent takes weeks to build. Not weeks of coding — weeks of tuning. You shape the persona until the tone finally sounds right. You build skills for the tasks you repeat every week. The memory slowly fills with your business context: what you tried, what worked, what you decided and why. You set up cron jobs so research runs while you sleep. None of it is hard, but all of it takes real time, and the value compounds session after session.
Until now, every bit of that lived in one place. Laptop breaks — agent gone. New machine — rebuild everything by hand. A teammate wants the same setup — you talk them through every step and hope. If you followed my Hermes v0.20 coverage you know how quickly this platform moves, but portability was the missing piece. The export command fixes it: your entire agent becomes one archive file.
What is inside a Hermes export file?
This is the part that impressed me most. The export command does not grab a handful of settings — it packages the whole agent. Six pieces go into the archive, and each one answers part of the question "what actually makes my agent mine?"
1. The persona — who your agent is
The persona is the file that defines your agent's identity: how it talks, what it cares about, what it is allowed to do. It is the piece people spend the most time tuning, because it shapes every single response the agent ever gives. Mine took days of small edits before it stopped sounding generic and started sounding like a proper member of my team. That entire identity travels in the export, exactly as you tuned it.
If you want your Hermes agent built properly before you export it, the AI Profit Boardroom walks through persona, memory, skills and cron jobs step by step. → Build the agent worth keeping
2. Skills — the abilities you built over time
Skills are reusable abilities: writing emails in your exact tone, researching competitors the specific way you like it done, formatting reports the way your clients expect. Each skill encodes a way of working you would otherwise have to re-explain constantly. Every one of them comes along in the file, so the new copy of your agent does not just sound like yours — it works like yours from the first session.
3. Memory — the big one
Hermes is built around persistent memory, and this is the piece I care about most. Memory is the record of your sessions: your business, your projects, your decisions, what worked and what flopped. It is the most valuable thing in the archive for one simple reason — it came from real time spent working together, and it cannot be rebuilt from scratch. You can rewrite a persona in an afternoon; you cannot re-live months of sessions. If you want this piece to be worth exporting, my guide to the best memory for a Hermes agent covers how I structure mine. In the export, memory transfers intact.
4. Cron jobs — your schedules survive the move
Cron jobs are the scheduled tasks that run without you: my morning research runs, daily summaries, overnight checks. They all go into the archive, and the schedules carry over — import the file on another machine and the automations resume rather than needing to be set up again.
5. Plugins and settings — every connection, every option
Every tool you have connected and every option you have changed is captured too. This is the boring-but-vital layer — the difference between an agent that works on day one and an afternoon spent muttering "why is that integration missing?" at a fresh install.
6. Desktop themes and layout — yes, even the look
Even the way your desktop looks moves with the export. It is a small thing, but it tells you a lot about the intent behind the feature: this is not a partial backup of the important bits. It is the whole agent, down to the wallpaper.
The key detail: your API keys never go in the file
Now for the design decision that makes all of this genuinely important. API keys, credentials and login tokens are stripped out automatically. None of it goes into the archive — not one token. When the file is imported somewhere else, you authenticate fresh with your own keys. I cover that end of the process in my Hermes backup import guide, so I will not repeat the walkthrough here.
Why does this matter so much? Because it is the difference between a backup feature and a sharing feature. If your keys lived inside the file, you could never safely hand it to anyone — one leaked file would mean someone burning through your accounts on your bill. With keys stripped, a Hermes export is safe to pass around. You can hand your whole agent — identity, skills, memory, schedules — to a teammate or a community, and they simply plug in their own access on their side. Nous Research made the file shareable by design, and that single choice unlocks everything below.
📺 Watch: Grok Bot DESTROYS Hermes Agent?
What Hermes export unlocks
Protection. The obvious win first: export regularly and a stolen bag or a dead laptop stops being a disaster. I treat it like a savings habit rather than a chore, and I have written the routine up properly in my Hermes backup guide.
Machine moves. New laptop, a desktop at the office, a server in the cloud — export on one machine, import on the other, authenticate, carry on. For the full step-by-step of getting an archive running again, my Hermes backup restore walkthrough covers it end to end.
Teams. Build one excellent agent, then hand the file to every person in the business. Everyone starts from the same tuned persona, the same skills, the same operating knowledge — the same thinking behind my Agent OS, where the whole point is that good setups should be systemised, not locked in one person's head.
Community profiles. This is where it gets interesting. Shareable agent profiles are already being discussed in the community — research agents, content agents tuned for newsletters, passed around like templates. There is even early talk of meta-agents managing collections of these profiles, though I want to be straight with you: that is a plan people are excited about, not a shipped feature.
📺 Watch: NEW Hermes Desktop Browser Update Is INSANE!
The bigger idea: your agent becomes a portable asset
Here is the short version of the thesis. The model — the brain — belongs to the vendor. Nous, Anthropic, Grok, DeepSeek: their models keep changing, and that is out of your hands. Everything you built on top of the model is yours, and export turns it into a portable asset. Keep the identity, upgrade the brain underneath, and your work compounds instead of resetting every time something better ships. Which brain I actually swap in comes down to my Goldie Bench testing; the identity riding on top no longer cares. I unpack this idea properly in my Hermes agent backup and restore hub, so I will leave the full argument to that page.
| Travels in the export file | Stripped out automatically |
|---|---|
| Persona — identity, tone, rules | API keys |
| Skills — every reusable ability | Credentials and passwords |
| Memory — the full session record | Login tokens |
| Cron jobs — schedules resume on import | — |
| Plugins and settings | — |
| Desktop themes and layout | — |
Frequently asked questions
What does a Hermes export include?
Everything that makes the agent yours: the persona, all your skills, the full memory, cron jobs with their schedules, plugins and settings, and even desktop themes and layout. It is the entire agent in one archive file — not a selection of the important parts.
Are my API keys in the export file?
No. Keys, credentials and login tokens are stripped out automatically before the archive is written. Whoever imports the file — you on a new machine, or someone you share it with — authenticates fresh with their own keys.
Can I share my exported agent with someone else?
Yes, and that is precisely the point of the key-stripping design. Hand the file to a teammate and they get your agent's identity, abilities and knowledge while plugging in their own access. Nothing in the archive lets them touch your accounts.
Does memory really transfer?
It does, and for me that is the headline. The memory that moves is the same living record your agent built up across every session with you — which is exactly why I call this more than a backup. Settings can be recreated; that history cannot.
How often should I export?
After any session where the agent learned something you would hate to lose — and weekly at an absolute minimum. The command takes seconds, so the habit costs you nothing and protects weeks of work.
My verdict on Hermes export
Two objections keep coming up. First: is this not just a fancy backup button? I understand the instinct, but agents are not settings. The memory inside that file is a living record of the agent working with you — a backup button copies configuration, while this preserves something you built together over weeks. Second: it sounds too technical. It is one command. If you can save a file, you can do this.
My verdict is simple: this is the update that turns a Hermes agent from something you have into something you own. Weeks of tuning are no longer trapped in one machine — they are a file in your hand. If you are earlier in the journey and still building the agent itself, my Hermes agent course takes you from blank install to something genuinely worth exporting. Then run the export command and keep what you built.
If you want an agent worth exporting — and a business that actually uses it, check out the AI Profit Boardroom — inside you get step-by-step Hermes tutorials, the Agent OS, four weekly coaching calls, daily updates and 3,000+ business owners doing this alongside you. → Make your agent a portable asset
