hermes

clanka hermes <subcommand>

Needs the clanka plugin that hermes/install.sh builds and installs under ~/.hermes/plugins/clanka, and hermes on your PATH. See the Hermes guide.

The commands drive the Hermes CLI and are safe to run again: they set the same values and rewrite the profile’s SOUL.md. They work the same from a shell and from an agent’s terminal inside Hermes.

profile

clanka hermes profile <profile> <soul>

Makes a Hermes profile that is one companion and nothing else:

• clanka’s two tools are the only toolset on every platform, listed directly instead of behind Hermes’s tool-search bridge.
• Hermes’s own memory, user profile, coding brief, toolchain probe and agent-style guidance are off.
• SOUL.md is the persona.

Each turn then carries the persona and the conversation instead of Hermes’s whole toolbox. On Haiku, the system prompt and tools went from about 19k tokens on a stock profile to about 1.2k.

The root’s own providers:, model aliases, reasoning overrides and model_overrides are copied in. The keys those providers read are copied from ~/.hermes/.env into the profile’s, since a profile loads only its own .env.

Run it again after editing the persona to refresh SOUL.md. A toolset you added next to clanka on a platform is kept. A gateway that already serves the profile re-reads its config on its own.

<profile>

The Hermes profile to make or refresh. Lower case, one word.

<soul>

The companion’s soul.md, as printed by clanka init.

clanka hermes profile nova ~/.config/clanka/souls/<id>.md
hermes -p nova chat

nightshade

clanka hermes nightshade [--profile <profile>] [--model <model>]

Makes the Nightshade profile: an agent that interviews you about the companion you want, writes its soul.md, lints it and wires it in with clanka hermes profile.

The terminal and file tools are all it has. The root’s own providers:, model aliases and their keys are shared with it, so /model <alias> works in its chat.

--profile <profile>

The Hermes profile to make or refresh.

• Default: nightshade

clanka hermes nightshade --profile soulwriter

--model <model>

The model it runs on, as Hermes names it. A stronger model interviews better, and the session is short.

• Default: the Hermes default

clanka hermes nightshade --model claude-opus-5-5
hermes -p nightshade chat

refresh

clanka hermes refresh [--no-restart]

Brings every profile clanka made up to the installed plugin, then restarts the gateway. hermes/install.sh runs it, because each profile runs a copy of the plugin and a running gateway keeps the build it loaded.

• A profile with a soul in its clanka settings gets what clanka hermes profile does with that soul.
• A profile whose SOUL.md is Nightshade’s gets what clanka hermes nightshade does, on the model it has.
• Any other profile is left alone.

A profile that fails is named, the rest are still done, and the command fails.

--no-restart

Leave the gateway running the build it loaded.

• Default: false

clanka hermes refresh --no-restart