honcho

A memory system for Hermes that models users across conversations and keeps separate identities for different agent profiles.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to configure Honcho locally or in the cloud, check its connection, manage profile peers, and tune observation, recall, summaries, and context limits.
Why use it?
It helps an agent retain useful context between sessions without mixing the memories of separate profiles.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/chemany/mente/honcho
Any agent
npx skills add chemany/Mente --skill honcho
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/chemany/Mente

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 65 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,668 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 95% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00065 $0.04668
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.02334
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00934
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00467

Measured 2d ago against content hash cd03e1b0105c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

honcho scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

95% identical to honcho — 9 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

optional-skills/autonomous-ai-agents/honcho/SKILL.md · 431 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 431 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Honcho Memory for Hermes

Honcho provides AI-native cross-session user modeling. It learns who the user is across conversations and gives every Hermes profile its own peer identity while sharing a unified view of the user.

When to Use

  • Setting up Honcho (cloud or self-hosted)
  • Troubleshooting memory not working / peers not syncing
  • Creating multi-profile setups where each agent has its own Honcho peer
  • Tuning observation, recall, dialectic depth, or write frequency settings
  • Understanding what the 5 Honcho tools do and when to use them
  • Configuring context budgets and session summary injection

Setup

Cloud (app.honcho.dev)

hermes honcho setup
# select "cloud", paste API key from https://app.honcho.dev

Self-hosted

hermes honcho setup
# select "local", enter base URL (e.g. http://localhost:8000)

See: https://docs.honcho.dev/v3/guides/integrations/hermes#running-honcho-locally-with-hermes

Verify

hermes honcho status    # shows resolved config, connection test, peer info

Architecture

Base Context Injection

When Honcho injects context into the system prompt (in hybrid or context recall modes), it assembles the base context block in this order:

  1. Session summary -- a short digest of the current session so far (placed first so the model has immediate conversational continuity)
  2. User representation -- Honcho's accumulated model of the user (preferences, facts, patterns)
  3. AI peer card -- the identity card for this Hermes profile's AI peer

The session summary is generated automatically by Honcho at the start of each turn (when a prior session exists). It gives the model a warm start without replaying full history.

Cold / Warm Prompt Selection

Honcho automatically selects between two prompt strategies:

Condition Strategy What happens
No prior session or empty representation Cold start Lightweight intro prompt; skips summary injection; encourages the model to learn about the user
Existing representation and/or session history Warm start Full base context injection (summary → representation → card); richer system prompt

Read the full file on GitHub · 431 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 431 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A cd03e1b0105c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

honcho is a skill published in the GitHub repository chemany/Mente (11 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 4,668 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 95% identical to honcho, differing in 9 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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