honcho

A setup and troubleshooting guide for Honcho, a service that builds a model of a user across separate conversations and agent profiles.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps configure Honcho in the cloud or locally, check its status, set up multiple agent profiles, and tune what context is recorded or recalled.
Why use it?
It helps agents retain and share useful user context between sessions, while making connection, syncing, and memory problems easier to diagnose.

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/nousresearch/hermes-agent/honcho
Any agent
npx skills add NousResearch/hermes-agent --skill honcho
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 12 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,628 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found 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 $0.00012 $0.04628
Opus 5 $0.00006 $0.02314
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00926
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00463

Measured yesterday against content hash 7623d663cb5e, 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 yesterday.

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

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

  • honcho — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
  • honcho — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
  • honcho — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
  • honcho — 98% identical, 7 lines differ
  • honcho — 98% identical, 7 lines differ
  • honcho — 97% identical, 2 lines differ
  • honcho — 97% identical, 2 lines differ
  • honcho — 97% identical, 2 lines differ
optional-skills/autonomous-ai-agents/honcho/SKILL.md · 432 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 432 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 memory setup honcho
# select "cloud", paste API key from https://app.honcho.dev

Self-hosted

hermes memory setup honcho
# 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 · 432 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. yesterday First seen · 432 lines · 12 tokens per session scan A 7623d663cb5e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

honcho is a skill published in the GitHub repository NousResearch/hermes-agent (238,457 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 12 tokens to every session and 4,628 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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