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Hindsight Is Now a Native Memory Provider in Hermes Agent

· 5 min read
Ben Bartholomew
Ben Bartholomew
Hindsight Team

Hindsight is now a native memory provider in Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent now ships with a pluggable memory provider system. Hindsight is one of the supported backends, and it's the one that leads on the benchmark that actually tests memory at scale.

How It Works​

Hindsight integrates at two points in the Hermes lifecycle:

Before each turn, Hindsight queues an async prefetch. Relevant memories from your past sessions are retrieved and injected into the system prompt before the LLM sees your message. The model has context from previous conversations without you repeating yourself.

After each response, your conversation is retained asynchronously. Hindsight extracts facts, entities, and relationships in the background. What you say in this turn becomes searchable starting the next call.

This is intentional: the prefetch pattern means memories from the current turn won't appear until the next one. It keeps every call fast.

Why Hindsight on Hermes​

Hermes ships with a built-in memory tool that saves notes to local markdown files. It works, but it captures what the model explicitly decides to write down, not what it implicitly learns from your conversations. Context doesn't accumulate automatically. If you ask Hermes to help you plan a sprint on Monday and then open a new session on Friday, it doesn't remember the project, the team, or the deadline unless you re-establish that context yourself.

Hindsight solves this with persistent memory across conversations. You mention a product launch deadline once. A week later, in a new session on a different topic, Hermes already knows it. You didn't repeat yourself. You didn't paste in context. It was recalled automatically.

Of all the supported memory providers, Hindsight is the only one with published results on BEAM, the benchmark that tests memory at 10 million tokens, where context stuffing is physically impossible. Hindsight scores 64.1% at that tier. The next-best published result is 40.6%.

Setting It Up​

Setup is a single wizard command:

hermes memory setup    # select "hindsight"

Then confirm memory is active:

hermes memory status

Config lives at $HERMES_HOME/hindsight/config.json:

KeyDefaultDescription
modecloudcloud or local
bank_idhermesMemory bank identifier
budgetmidRecall thoroughness: low / mid / high
memory_modehybridhybrid, context, or tools — see below
prefetch_methodrecallrecall (fast) or reflect (LLM-synthesized)

Memory Modes​

Auto-recall is the core behavior: before every turn, Hindsight automatically fetches relevant memories from your history and injects them into the system prompt. Hermes has the context it needs without the model calling any tool and without you repeating yourself. It happens transparently on every call.

The memory_mode setting controls whether auto-recall is active and whether explicit tools are also exposed:

ModeBehavior
hybrid (default)Memories auto-injected before every turn, plus hindsight_recall, hindsight_retain, and hindsight_reflect tools exposed to the model
contextAuto-recall only — memories injected automatically, no tools visible to the model
toolsExplicit tools only — model must call hindsight_recall to retrieve memories; nothing is injected automatically

prefetch_method controls how memories are retrieved during auto-recall:

  • recall (default): semantic search, keyword matching, entity graph traversal, and reranking. Fast.
  • reflect: LLM synthesizes a coherent summary across all relevant memories. Slower, but more useful for complex context.

Migrating from the Old Plugin​

If you previously installed hindsight-hermes as a pip plugin (the approach from our earlier guide), uninstall it first:

uv pip uninstall hindsight-hermes --python $HOME/.hermes/hermes-agent/venv/bin/python

Then run the setup wizard to configure the native provider:

hermes memory setup

The native provider replaces everything the plugin did, with better lifecycle management and the full memory_mode and prefetch_method controls.

Local or Cloud​

In local mode, Hindsight runs an embedded server with built-in PostgreSQL. The daemon starts automatically in the background on first use; no manual setup required. You need an LLM API key for memory extraction:

{
  "mode": "local",
  "llm_provider": "groq",
  "llm_api_key": "your-groq-key"
}

The daemon starts when Hermes displays "starting agent" on your first message — not at launch. On a fresh system this can take over a minute while the embedded PostgreSQL server initializes. Subsequent startups are fast. Startup logs land at ~/.hermes/logs/hindsight-embed.log if you need to debug.

For persistent memory across machines or shared across multiple Hermes instances, use cloud mode instead. Both modes use the same API. Switching is a one-line config change, not a migration.

Get Started​