Hermes Agent a key old 429? Go to the key pool first

When Hermes Agent only has one key, it always hits 429, and many people's first reaction is to change providers directly. Now the official actually gave a more stable method: credential pools. The documentation is clearly written that it's multi-key rotation within the same provider, not a cross-provider fallback.

Why it's more symptomatic than just prescribing fallback

If you want to stay on OpenRouter, Anthropic, or a custom endpoint, 429 is often just a key filled, which doesn't mean the entire provider has to be cut off. Credential pools will first rotate between multiple credentials of the same provider, and only if all of them are not enough, it will be the turn of the fallback model.

How to get started

1. Use hermes auth add <provider> --api-key ... first and add a second key.
2. Use hermes auth list to see if the pool is active.
3. You need to have a rotation strategy, such as round_robin or least_used.

In a word: a key is 429, first go to credential pools, and then talk about cross-provider fallback.

Official open source address: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent; Official document entry: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/.