Your notes as the agent's second brain
“I want Hermes to read and write my Obsidian vault as its long-term memory, not a black-box database”
The recurring complaint in these stories is not that the agent forgets — it is that you cannot see or edit what it remembers. Plain-markdown memory fixes that at the root: the vault is human-readable, diffable and yours. But file-backed memory alone doesn't survive long sessions, which is why the context engine and the compaction guard are in the bundle rather than optional extras; losing standing instructions mid-session is the specific failure people describe. The memory browser closes the loop by making the agent's state inspectable instead of inferred from its behavior.
Real posts from the Hermes community, mirrored from Nous Research's user stories corpus.
How I use Obsidian as the long-term memory backbone for my AI assistant. (794-upvote diagram showing Hermes Agent writing structured markdown notes back into a synced Obsidian vault, treating the vault as the durable memory layer that survives context resets…
I do a really simple journal and log at the end of every day. I tried using Kimi 2.5 just like I would a Sonnet 4.6 but it messed all sorts of things up. When I said 'This is my log for last Thursday. Log it in Obsidian,' it didn't kick off my journaling…
I speak Turkish with it... initially said him to 'now i want you to use obsidian to manage my tasks and other stuff. and cross-check with my apple calendar'. later while working on another task today i said 'okay looks good. you know how you will manage tasks…
Having a competent agent with constant state has been good for memorializing and organizing important info directly into Obsidian, planning, and working out bugs with my home automation setup. Also helpful dealing with several miscellaneous servers in the…
Build a memory wiki — a site with all subjects we've talked about and daily logs. Every morning at 9am ask me what my number 1 priority is, then come up with tasks to help with that priority, then update your memories about me accordingly.
- Markdown memory scales worse than a vector store on retrieval quality once the vault gets large. This is a legibility-over-recall trade, made deliberately.
- Giving an agent write access to a vault you care about warrants a git-backed vault and a review habit.