I Asked the Self-Improving Agent to Improve Itself.

This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge

A first encounter with Hermes Agent and the four minutes that changed what I thought "self-improving" meant.

I had never run an agentic framework before. So when I read about Hermes, the thing that stopped me was the phrase stamped across the top of Hermes Agent, the open-source agent from Nous Research:

"The self-improving AI agent."

That phrase is either profound or it's marketing, and from the outside you cannot tell which. Everything says it's self-improving. So I did the most literal thing a beginner can do: I installed it, gave it some work to do with the purpose of catching it in the act.