hermes-council

Adversarial multi-perspective council MCP server for hermes-agent

★ 8 Python MIT Updated 3/18/2026

hermes-council

Adversarial multi-perspective council MCP server for hermes-agent.

Five personas from distinct intellectual traditions debate questions through structured adversarial deliberation, producing calibrated verdicts with confidence scores, evidence links, and DPO preference pairs for RL training.

Origin: This project was built in response to feedback on hermes-agent PR #848, where the adversarial council concept was proposed as a core subsystem. The recommendation was to rebuild it as an external MCP server to avoid core tool injection, provider bypass, hidden LLM costs, and brittle parsing. Integration PR: #1972.

Install

pip install git+https://github.com/Ridwannurudeen/hermes-council.git

For RL components:

pip install "hermes-council[rl] @ git+https://github.com/Ridwannurudeen/hermes-council.git"

Quick Start

Add to your hermes-agent config (~/.hermes/config.yaml):

mcp_servers:
  council:
    command: hermes-council-server

Set your API key:

export OPENROUTER_API_KEY=your-key-here

Tools

Tool	Description	Personas
`council_query`	Full 5-persona adversarial deliberation on complex questions	All 5
`council_evaluate`	Evaluate content quality through adversarial critique	All 5
`council_gate`	Quick safety review before high-stakes actions	Skeptic + Oracle + Arbiter

Configuration

All configuration is via environment variables:

Variable	Description	Default
`COUNCIL_API_KEY`	API key (highest priority)	—
`OPENROUTER_API_KEY`	OpenRouter API key	—
`NOUS_API_KEY`	Nous API key	—
`OPENAI_API_KEY`	OpenAI API key (lowest priority)	—
`COUNCIL_BASE_URL`	API base URL	`https://openrouter.ai/api/v1`
`COUNCIL_MODEL`	Model to use	`nousresearch/hermes-3-llama-3.1-70b`
`COUNCIL_TIMEOUT`	Request timeout (seconds)	`60`
`COUNCIL_CONFIG`	Path to custom config YAML	`~/.hermes-council/config.yaml`

Custom Personas

Create ~/.hermes-council/config.yaml:

personas:
  security_analyst:
    tradition: "Adversarial security thinking"
    system_prompt: "You are a security analyst. Evaluate every claim for attack vectors, failure modes, and adversarial scenarios."
    scoring_weights:
      threat_assessment: 0.4
      evidence: 0.3
      rigor: 0.3
    tags: ["security", "adversarial"]

Custom personas merge with the 5 defaults. Use the same name to override a default.

The Five Personas

Persona	Tradition	Role
Advocate	Steel-manning	Builds the strongest case FOR the position
Skeptic	Popperian falsificationism	Finds the observation that kills the claim
Oracle	Empirical base-rate reasoning	Grounds debate in historical data and statistics
Contrarian	Kuhnian paradigm critique	Rejects the framing, proposes alternative paradigms
Arbiter	Bayesian synthesis	Synthesizes all views with explicit prior/posterior updates

Skills

Install council skills for hermes-agent:

hermes-council install-skills

This copies skill definitions to ~/.hermes/skills/council/:

multi-perspective-analysis — Full council deliberation workflow
bayesian-synthesis — Bayesian reasoning and evidence synthesis
adversarial-critique — Stress-testing and safety gating

RL Integration

CouncilEvaluator

Use the council as a reward signal for RL training:

from hermes_council.rl.evaluator import CouncilEvaluator

evaluator = CouncilEvaluator(model="nousresearch/hermes-3-llama-3.1-70b")

# Evaluate agent output
verdict = await evaluator.evaluate(
    content=agent_output,
    question="Research question here",
    criteria=["accuracy", "depth", "evidence", "falsifiability"],
)

# Get normalized reward (0.0-1.0)
reward = evaluator.normalized_reward(verdict)

# Extract DPO preference pairs
dpo_pairs = evaluator.extract_dpo_pairs(verdict)

OuroborosEnv

An example Atropos RL environment is provided in examples/ouroboros_env.py. Copy it into your hermes-agent installation:

cp examples/ouroboros_env.py /path/to/hermes-agent/environments/
cp examples/ouroboros.yaml /path/to/hermes-agent/datagen-config-examples/

Development

git clone https://github.com/Ridwannurudeen/hermes-council.git
cd hermes-council
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

License

MIT