One agent, many desks: Hermes profiles
After a few weeks of living in Hermes, the problem was not that the agent forgot things. It remembered too well. Sales notes leaked into coding sessions. A cheap model I wanted for drafting still carried the heavy project context from the morning. Skills from one workflow showed up when I was trying to do something else. One agent is great until it starts treating your whole life as a single desk.
Named profiles fixed that without turning Hermes into a second product. A profile is just a separate home for the agent: its own config, memory, skills, and defaults. Same CLI, same habits, different desk. I create one when a topic deserves its own walls, not when I feel like organizing for the sake of organizing.
The commands are boring on purpose. Create a profile, pick a model for it, start a session with that profile, list what you already have. None of that is clever. The clever part is the boundary. When I open a profile for the blog, I am not dragging the housing-company sales pipeline into the room. When I open a coding profile, I am not asking a privacy-sensitive model to carry every casual experiment I ran last week.
I use profiles for three practical reasons. First, separate concerns. Blog writing, product work, and trading experiments do not need the same memory or the same skills. Second, cost. Some tasks are fine on a cheaper or faster model. Others need the stronger one. Profiles let me stop pretending one default fits both. Third, privacy posture. Not every conversation belongs with the same provider. Being able to route a topic without rewriting my whole setup is the difference between meaning to be careful and actually being careful.
What surprised me is how little ceremony this adds day to day. I do not manage profiles like a fleet. Most days I only touch two or three. The default stays default. The named ones exist so I do not have to keep saying "ignore the other project" or "use the other model this time." The agent should not need a speech every morning about who I am today.
This is the same lesson as the plain HTML blog. Fewer shared surfaces, clearer ownership, less invisible coupling. Profiles do not make Hermes smarter. They make it less mixed up. If you already trust one agent enough to hand it real work, the next upgrade is rarely another feature. It is a door between the rooms.