Hermes adds creative coding skills
Nous Research updated Hermes to include new skills like p5.js creative coding, manim video creation, and research-paper writing, with top contributors such as @SHL0MS making multiple PRs to the project. That’s meaningful for writers and creative coders because it signals toolchains that can support multimedia storytelling and data‑driven longform work. (x.com)
Hermes is not just a chat model anymore. In the Hermes Agent repository, Nous Research has been adding packaged “skills” that let the system do full jobs, and in the last few days those jobs expanded into browser art, animated math video, and academic paper drafting. (github.com 1) (github.com 2) The timing is recent and concrete. Hermes Agent v0.8.0 was released on April 8, 2026, and the release notes say the project merged 209 pull requests with 82 resolved issues in that cycle. (github.com 1) (github.com 2) A Hermes “skill” is basically a reusable playbook. The project docs describe the agent as self-improving and able to create and improve skills over time, so a skill is less like one prompt and more like a saved workflow with tools, files, and instructions attached. (github.com) (nousresearch.com) That is why p5.js matters here. p5.js is the JavaScript library many artists and teachers use to make sketches, interactive visuals, and little browser worlds, and the Hermes site logs show a merged pull request from SHL0MS for a new p5.js skill on April 6. (github.com) The same contributor also pushed the animation side forward. The repository now includes a Manim video skill, and its README says Hermes can turn text prompts into “3Blue1Brown-style” animated explainers by planning scenes, generating Python code, rendering them, and stitching the results together. (github.com 1) (github.com 2) Manim is the software stack behind many equation-heavy explainer videos. Hermes’s Manim skill lists use cases like neural network explainers, quicksort walkthroughs, proof animations, architecture diagrams, and before-and-after data stories, which means the tool is aimed at teaching visuals, not just pretty motion graphics. (github.com) (github.com) The writing side is there too. Hermes includes an “ML Paper Writing for Top AI Conferences” skill that targets venues like Neural Information Processing Systems, International Conference on Machine Learning, International Conference on Learning Representations, Association for Computational Linguistics, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and Conference on Language Modeling, with templates and citation-checking tools built in. (github.com) (github.com) That combination is the real story. One open-source agent is being wired to draft the paper, build the chart-driven animation, and generate the interactive browser sketch, which is much closer to a small multimedia studio than to a plain chatbot tab. (github.com) (github.com) (github.com) You can see the project’s shape in the installation docs too. Hermes installs Python, Node.js, ripgrep, and ffmpeg together, which is the kind of dependency list you need when one system is expected to write code, search files, and render media instead of only answering questions. (github.com) (nousresearch.com) The contributor trail is unusually visible. GitHub workflow logs show SHL0MS attached to merged work on p5.js, multiple Manim upgrades, a Manim font fix, and a research-paper-writing fix between April 5 and April 6, 2026, so this was not one isolated patch but a burst of capability-building in the same lane. (github.com) What changed this week is not that artificial intelligence can write text. What changed is that Hermes is being assembled into a system that can package an argument across code, visuals, and prose, using open repository skills that other people can inspect, fork, and extend. (github.com) (github.com)
