Introduction
What Hermes for GIS is, and how the configuration is put together.
Hermes for GIS is the documented configuration behind Mercator, a working GIS agent that runs on the open-source Hermes agent from Nous Research. It is a summary of a real setup: the toolsets, MCP servers, the local GIS stack, and a library of GIS skills you can pull from GitHub into your own Hermes profile.
What is what
Hermes is the agent, a self-improving CLI/TUI agent with a learning loop, skills, and a toolset system, built by Nous Research (MIT). Hermes for GIS is this configuration: the tools, stack, and skills that turn Hermes into a GIS agent. It is an independent project and is not affiliated with Nous Research.
What the configuration includes
- A GIS toolset, exposing
esri,open-data, andpostgistools the agent can call through its normal<tool_call>function calling. - MCP servers for Esri, Census, open data, and research.
- A local GIS stack on the machine: PostGIS, QGIS, GDAL, DuckDB, Tippecanoe, and a Python geo environment.
- A skill library, 21 agentskills.io skills in
~/.hermes/skills/gis/.
What Hermes brings
- A model-agnostic runtime that runs on the provider you configure per profile.
- A learning loop that curates and refines skills across sessions.
- Cross-session recall, a full TUI, and messaging gateways.
Where to start
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash
git clone github.com/daraobeirnecode/hermes-gis-skills ~/.hermes/skills/gis
hermesThen read Installation for the full setup, or Configuration summary for the complete inventory of toolsets, MCP servers, stack, and skills.