When the Hermes Agent creates a new profile, it finds that skills, memories, or sessions are "missing", and there is a high probability that it is normally isolated. A profile is originally a separate Hermes instance: each with its own configuration, sessions, skills, and home directories. If you want to copy old data, you need to choose the correct clone method when creating it.
clone and clone-all are not the same
In the official CLI reference, hermes profile create name --clone copies the basic content such as configuration, .env, and SOUL.md; --clone-all copies more state. If you only create an empty profile, you will naturally not see the skills and memories of the old profile.
How to judge whether the profile is cut incorrectly
- Run
hermes profile listto see what profiles are currently available. - Run
hermes profile show 名称to see the home directory. - Use
hermes -p 名称 chatto temporarily specify profiles to avoid misleading sticky defaults. - Verify that
HERMES_HOMEis not overwritten by manual environment variables.
Recommended use
Work, personal, test, and automation robots can be divided into profiles; parallel tasks in the same code repository do not necessarily need to be divided into profiles, more often using worktrees. The more profiles, the higher the cost of managing models, keys, memories, and skills.
If you just want to experiment with a new configuration temporarily, creating a new empty profile is a good thing; if you want to replicate a mature environment, use --clone or --clone-all and delete keys that shouldn't be shared after creation.
