It’s Wednesday night and you’re drafting a weekly report. “What is the community actually saying about that new framework?” — you’d love to know. Then reality hits: if Hermes runs on a server, Reddit is effectively dead from that IP — the website throws a “Prove your humanity” wall, the .json endpoints answer 403, and every workaround loops back to the same dead end. RSS is not much better: either install a reader or hand-roll a parser for a dozen XML dialects. That whole information channel is dark, so “research” becomes guesswork. Two bundled skills that landed on Hermes main on September 5, 2026 fix exactly this: rss-feeds turns RSS / Atom / JSON feeds into one clean, date-sorted list, and reddit-reading reads Reddit with no browser and no account — both ship with the agent, zero install, zero configuration.

What these two skills are, in plain words

Skills in Hermes are operation manuals living in the agent’s head: when a relevant situation shows up, the agent loads the manual and follows its steps. Both newcomers are bundled skills — they ship with Hermes and work out of the box, unlike optional skills that need an install command first.

• rss-feeds: reads RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0/RDF, Atom, and JSON Feed formats, and returns a clean newest-first list (title, link, UTC published time, author, summary). Standard library only — nothing to install. Hand it an ordinary page URL and it can even discover the feed hidden behind that page.
• reddit-reading: reads subreddit listings, site- and subreddit-wide search, full threads with comments, and user activity. It does not post, vote, or log in as you — strictly read-only.

The use cases write themselves: community sentiment (“what is r/LocalLLaMA saying about this model?”), release monitoring via GitHub’s releases.atom, and turning the ten sites you “check every day” into one scheduled digest.

RSS: from “install a reader” to “just ask”

You talk to Hermes in plain language — no command syntax to memorize:

“What versions has this GitHub repo released recently?” “Summarize the latest posts on https://simonwillison.net/” “Send me new arXiv cs.CL papers every morning at 9.”

Under the hood, the skill runs a small companion script. Point it at any RSS/Atom/JSON feed — or at a plain homepage, and it discovers the feed for you:

python3 scripts/feed.py read https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/releases.atom --limit 5
python3 scripts/feed.py read https://simonwillison.net/            # page URL → feed auto-discovered
python3 scripts/feed.py read URL --since 2026-09-01 --json          # only entries newer than a date
python3 scripts/feed.py discover https://example.com/               # list candidate feed URLs on a page

Each entry comes back with title / link / published (UTC) / author / summary — HTML stripped, summaries capped at 2000 characters, sorted newest first. It knows the common feed URL patterns by heart:

What you want	Feed URL
GitHub releases / commits / tags	https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/releases.atom, …/commits/BRANCH.atom
A subreddit	https://www.reddit.com/r/NAME/.rss
A YouTube channel	https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC…
Hacker News	https://hnrss.org/frontpage, https://hnrss.org/newest?q=term
arXiv papers	https://rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CL
Substack / Medium / WordPress / Ghost	site /feed, medium.com/feed/@user, etc.

Two details earn their keep. First, for scheduled digests use --since to fetch only what’s newer than your last check — persist the latest published value from the previous run and pass it back next time, and you get natural deduplication without re-scraping the whole front page (pairs neatly with Hermes cron automation). Second, feed summaries are often truncated or first-paragraph-only — for the full article, hand an entry’s link to web_extract.

Reddit: readable from a server IP, no login

You’ve probably tried it: from a VPS, reddit.com/…/.json returns 403, and so do api.reddit.com and old.reddit.com; spoofing a browser User-Agent still gets 403; even r.jina.ai-style proxies and browser tools hit a “blocked by network security” humanity wall. Reddit closes nearly every unauthenticated door to datacenter IPs — except its own public Atom feeds. That’s the default backend of reddit-reading: Reddit’s .rss endpoints, anonymous and login-free, at the cost of a heavy throttle (roughly one request per minute per IP) and thinner data (post + top-level comments, no scores).

Need more frequent or fuller reads (say, sustained monitoring of one subreddit)? There is a free optional upgrade: register a “script”-type app at Reddit’s app settings page and put its two values in ~/.hermes/.env:

REDDIT_CLIENT_ID=...
REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET=...

One common misunderstanding deserves a clear note: this is app registration, not a user login. The script uses only the app-only client_credentials grant — never your username, password, or browser cookies, and it never acts as you. With both values set it switches to the OAuth API automatically (~100 requests per minute, nested comments, scores, comment counts); if they’re missing or rejected it falls back to the anonymous feeds. Side by side:

	Anonymous (default)	OAuth app credentials
Setup	nothing	free app registration, two .env values
Rate limit	~1 request / minute / IP	~100 requests / minute
Thread data	post + top-level comments, no scores	nested comments, scores, comment counts
Acts as a user	no	no

Again, natural language is the primary interface (“what’s r/LocalLLaMA talking about lately?”); the underlying commands look like this:

python3 scripts/reddit.py doctor                                  # active backend + rate-limit window
python3 scripts/reddit.py sub LocalLLaMA --sort hot --limit 15
python3 scripts/reddit.py search "hermes agent" --sub LocalLLaMA --sort new
python3 scripts/reddit.py thread <post-url> --limit 40            # post + comment tree
python3 scripts/reddit.py user spez --limit 10

If you haven’t run doctor in this session, run it first — it tells you which backend is live and how many seconds remain in the anonymous window, so you don’t plan a five-call research run that collides with the throttle (anonymous mode allows roughly one request per minute; on a 429 the script waits out the window and retries once).

“What are people saying about X?”: one question, five lanes

Each skill is useful alone; the chemistry comes from the combo. Both were wired into Hermes’ research chain — grounded-citations and competitor-news-monitor now list them as related skills. The result: when you ask “what are people saying about X right now?”, Hermes fans the question out across several lanes — web search, Reddit discussion, feeds, video, code — and cites every claim back to its original link (a thread’s permalink, not the listing page) so you can click through and check. Compared with web-search-only research, this multi-platform sweep is far less likely to miss what a community is actually saying.

Read the boundaries before you rely on it

• Strictly read-only: reddit-reading doesn’t post, vote, message, or do anything requiring a user login. Making Hermes write to Reddit is a different story, out of this skill’s scope.
• Don’t fight the 403s: from datacenter IPs, .json/api.reddit.com/old.reddit.com are dead ends and UA spoofing won’t save you; r.jina.ai is blocked too. Stay on the skill’s default channel. The Wayback route in blocked-page-recovery can only rescue archived old threads — it can’t fetch fresh ones.
• The throttle is by design: the ~1 req/min anonymous limit is Reddit’s rule; the script waits out the window, but if you need sustained high-volume reads (monitoring, dozens of calls), register the free app credentials instead of hammering retries.
• Keep the secret out of chat: REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET lives only in .env, read from the environment — never paste it into a conversation or log.
• Release status: both skills merged to main on September 5, 2026 — after v0.21.0 (released August 31) — so they’re currently main-only and will ride along with the next release; Hermes’ updater carries bundled skills with it. To try them today, run an install tracking latest main.

Wrap-up

“Reading the community” used to be one of the most awkward things to do from a server-hosted agent — Reddit throws up walls at every turn, and RSS meant building your own wheel. Now both are zero-install skills that travel with the agent: RSS covers the breadth (GitHub, HN, arXiv, blogs, podcasts), Reddit covers the depth (subreddits, search, threads, users), and the auto-fanning research sweep with per-claim citations means keeping a finger on the industry’s pulse can finally be handed off entirely. And if you already lean on Hermes’ free search channels, this web-plus-community-plus-feeds combo closes the loop on everyday intelligence gathering.