Day 1 · Fri, Sep 25, 2026 · Talk — no lab

Intro to LLMs and Hermes

Course title with a timeline of all 7 sessions across two weeks, dates and titles, Day 1 marked as you are here

Welcome to Agentic AI with Hermes Agent — a free, live, hands-on 2-week intensive running Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings from Friday, September 25 through Friday, October 9, 2026. Seven sessions in total, no prerequisites, just curiosity. By the end you'll have deployed a working Hermes agent of your own — a digital agent that keeps working and learning for you 24x7, built one session at a time across fundamentals, LLM routing, RAG, MCPs, tool calling, and a final production deployment.

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A talk-only kickoff session — no hands-on lab today. Before anyone touches a terminal, we'll cover what a large language model actually is, why Hermes Agent(Nous Research's CLI coding/agent assistant) is the tool we're building around for this course, and what "agentic AI" means in practice versus just chatting with a model.

What we'll cover

The big picture: what an LLM is, and what makes an agent different from a chatbot
Why Hermes Agent is provider-agnostic — it talks to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, local or cloud
A first look at the hardware we'll be running on: the DGX Spark and Sanjay's Mac Mini
A preview of the 7-session arc: fundamentals → routing → RAG → MCPs → tool calling → deployment
Course logistics: schedule, time zones, and how to get set up before Day 2

Get ready for Day 2: hands-on labs start Monday, Sep 28, with Hermes Fundamentals. Come to that session with Hermes Agent already installed if possible.

Session notes: to be filled in after the live session on Sep 25, 2026.