The Hermes agent, made production-reliable
Hermes models earned their reputation as agent brains: steerable, strong at instruction-following, and good at tool-calling. But the gap between "Hermes follows my tool schema in a demo" and "my Hermes agent runs unattended for an hour" is reliability — surviving rate limits and the empty-tool-response problem. CodeBurst closes that gap with a tool-ready endpoint that fails over across providers and repairs tool turns automatically.
Why Hermes for agents
The Hermes family (from NousResearch) is popular for agentic work because it's neutral and steerable — it follows your system prompt and tool definitions closely instead of fighting them, which is exactly what you want when the model is driving a loop of tool calls rather than chatting. That makes it a natural pick for planners, research agents, and assistants that act.
Where agents actually break
The model's tool-calling skill is rarely the problem. Two infrastructure issues are:
- Rate limits mid-loop. One agent task can fire dozens of calls in a burst and trip a provider's per-minute cap halfway through — leaving the agent with an error in the middle of a multi-step job.
- Empty tool-synthesis turns. On the turn where a reasoning model should fold a tool result back into an answer, some models return empty content. The agent gets nothing and stalls — not because the model can't reason, but because of how the tool-call format is handled.
What CodeBurst adds
| Problem | CodeBurst's answer |
|---|---|
| Provider rate-limits mid-loop | Every model name is a multi-provider chain; CodeBurst reroutes to a healthy provider in the same request. |
| Empty response on a tool turn | codeburst-agent detects it and retries with a corrected format, so the agent receives a real answer. |
| Need a stronger brain for hard steps | Fail over to codeburst-swarm — multiple models vote for a more reliable result. |
| Want to keep Hermes' style | Pin a Hermes-class lane while still getting provider-level failover underneath. |
Connect your agent
CodeBurst is OpenAI-compatible — most agent frameworks take a base URL and key. In Python:
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://codeburst.ai/api/v1",
api_key="YOUR_CODEBURST_KEY",
)
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="codeburst-agent", # tool-ready, with failover + tool-call repair
messages=[...],
tools=[...], # your tool schema, unchanged
)Your tool definitions don't change. CodeBurst handles routing, provider failover, and tool-format repair behind the single codeburst-agent name — so the same agent code that worked in a demo holds up across a long unattended run.
Get started
Get an API key Using OpenClaw? Read this →FAQ
What is a Hermes agent?
An agent backed by a Hermes model — steerable and strong at tool-calling, a common choice for autonomous agents.
Why route it through CodeBurst?
To survive rate limits and empty tool turns: CodeBurst fails over across providers and repairs tool responses so the agent doesn't stall.
Does my tool schema change?
No. It's the standard OpenAI tools format — change the base URL and key and your agent works.