The Hermes Agent SOUL.md didn't take effect, and many people's first reaction was that the file content was badly written, but now the official rule has changed: SOUL.md is only read from HERMES_HOME, no longer probes from the current working directory. So if you stuff it in the project root, Hermes Agent will most likely not look at it at all.
Correct placement
- Default Position:
~/.hermes/SOUL.md - If you use custom home:
$HERMES_HOME/SOUL.md
There are also two common misconceptions
- SOUL.md in the project directory does not count. The project directory mainly looks at the project context files such as
.hermes.md,AGENTS.md,CLAUDE.md. - An empty file equals no content. The documentation is very straightforward, if the SOUL file is empty, no personality settings will be injected into the prompt.
So the shortest answer to this question is: stop looking for SOUL.md in the project directory, look at ~/.hermes or your HERMES_HOME.
Official open source address: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent; Official document entry: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/.
