This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge : Write About Hermes Agent

The Honest Version Nobody Tells You

Most tutorials start with a clean Linux machine, a working API key, and someone who already knows what they're doing.

This is not that tutorial.

This is the story of building a real project with Hermes Agent starting from a Windows PC with virtualisation disabled in the BIOS, zero Linux environment, and a deadline three days away.

I built repo-audit-agent — a tool that uses Hermes Agent to perform first-pass technical reviews of GitHub repositories. Here's what I actually learned along the way.

Day 1: The Environment Problem

Before I could even think about Hermes Agent, I needed a Linux environment.

My Windows machine had WSL2 partially configured but virtualisation was disabled at the BIOS level — a common corporate lockdown. So WSL2 was out.

I tried:

Google Colab — works, but resets every session.…