If you’re using the free Hermes agent without hermes obsidian memory, you’re starting every single task from a blank slate, and that’s the most expensive free mistake you can make right now.
Here’s the upgrade nobody is talking about: you wire the free Hermes agent to a free Obsidian vault, and Hermes suddenly gets permanent, reusable memory.
A shared brain. An infinite context engine that holds your goals, your tasks, your notes and your full business context, ready every time you hit go.
It costs nothing. It takes minutes. And the people who do it now, while it’s free and new, will be miles ahead of the people who keep re-explaining themselves to a robot that forgets them every morning.
The problem: most people use Hermes with no memory at all
Watch how most people use Hermes.
They open it. They type a request. They get a generic answer.
Then tomorrow they open it again, and they re-explain who they are, what their business does, what their goals are and how they like things written.
Every. Single. Time.
It’s like hiring a brilliant assistant who gets total amnesia overnight.
In the demo, terminal Hermes without memory took around two and a half minutes to think, and still handed back a poor, generic answer.
That’s not the agent being slow. That’s the agent being blind.
It had no idea who you are, so it had to reason about everything from scratch, burning time and tokens to produce something average.
Want the done-for-you version of this? The Agent OS inside the AI Profit Boardroom gives you the zip file, every prompt, the full Obsidian memory setup, a ready-to-use vault template, weekly coaching calls to wire your vault into Hermes, and a 30-day shared-brain roadmap. This is the fastest way to skip the trial and error.
What hermes obsidian memory actually is
Let me make this dead simple.
Obsidian is free, and underneath the app it’s nothing more than markdown files and folders sitting on your computer.
That folder of notes becomes your memory layer.
It holds your notes, your goals, your client folders and your past chats.
Hermes is free and open source, and it’s the worker. It runs the tasks.
So you’ve got the memory in one place and the muscle in another.
The whole game is connecting them.
That connection is what hermes obsidian memory means: the agent that does the work now reads the vault that remembers everything.
How to wire hermes obsidian together
This part is almost insultingly easy.
You set up your Obsidian vault locally with your notes, your goals and your client folders.
Then you tell Hermes, in plain English: “I’ve got my Obsidian set up locally, please use that for memory and context.”
That’s it. That’s the wiring.
From that point on, every Hermes job starts with the full picture.
It knows your business. It knows your goals. It knows your voice.
Why this is a free upgrade, not just a nice-to-have
When Hermes reads your vault first, four things change immediately.
- More personalised: outputs sound like you and your business, not a generic template.
- Better outputs: the agent reasons with context instead of guessing in the dark.
- Fewer tokens: fast retrieval from your notes beats slow re-thinking from scratch.
- Saves time: no daily re-prompting, no re-explaining yourself, ever.
Think about that token point for a second.
The blank-slate version spends its budget re-deriving who you are.
The memory version just looks it up and gets to work.
Faster, cheaper, and the answer is actually good.
Old way vs new way
Here’s the contrast laid out plainly.
| Hermes alone (old way) | Hermes + Obsidian shared brain (new way) |
|---|---|
| Starts blank every session | Starts with your full business context |
| You re-explain yourself daily | You explain once, it remembers forever |
| Generic, average outputs | Personalised outputs in your voice |
| Slow, around 2.5 mins for a poor answer | Fast retrieval, fewer tokens |
| Forgets your goals | Knows your goals, tasks and clients |
| Each agent works in isolation | Every agent reads the same shared brain |
The shared brain across all your agents
Here’s where it goes from clever to unfair.
You’re probably not just using Hermes.
You’ve got Claude, OpenClaw, Gemini, Antigravity, the whole crew.
That same Obsidian vault can be read by every one of them.
So instead of five agents pulling in five directions, they all read the same notes.
They align. They speak in one voice. They stop clashing.
One agent drops a note tonight. Another agent reads it next morning and picks up exactly where the first left off.
That handoff isn’t magic. It’s just the wiring. The vault is the meeting point.
This is what a real shared brain looks like, and it’s the difference between a pile of tools and an actual team.
The Goldie Hermes Memory Stack: 5 layers
Here’s how I think about the whole system, layer by layer.
- The Vault: your notes become memory. Plain markdown, sitting locally, holding everything that matters.
- The Bridge: Hermes reads the vault. This is the connection you set up in one sentence.
- The Shared Brain: every agent reads the same vault, so they all work from the same truth.
- Understanding: Hermes finds and understands new notes as they appear, no manual filing required.
- The Loop: every new note makes Hermes smarter, and Hermes writes the notes, so it improves automatically.
That last layer is the one that compounds.
Hermes does work, writes a note about it, and that note makes the next job better.
You’re not maintaining a memory. The system is feeding itself.
If you’d rather not figure this out alone, join the free AI Money Lab. It’s the easiest place to get started with this stuff at zero cost.
Keep the vault full automatically
You might be thinking, “I don’t have time to write notes all day.”
You don’t have to.
OMI is a free, open-source tool that takes notes on you and syncs them straight into Obsidian.
In the example, that was around 2,000 memories ready to export.
And remember the loop: new outputs from your agents become new notes automatically.
So your memory grows whether you’re typing or not.
Worried your vault is a mess? Hermes can organise and colour-code your notes for you. Just give it the Obsidian docs and let it tidy the place up.
Run it inside a mission-control Agent OS
This all works best inside one dashboard: a mission-control Agent OS.
One screen. You see the memory working. No tab switching between five different tools and a vault.
And here’s the kicker: Hermes can build the mission control for you.
The agent that uses the memory can also assemble the cockpit you run it from.
When to use memory, and when a normal chat is fine
You don’t need to wire everything into the vault.
Use the memory setup for the work that matters.
Your email list. Your client work. Your content strategy. Your copywriting. Anywhere the output should sound like you.
For a quick one-off question, a normal chat is perfectly fine.
Memory is for the high-stakes work where context is the whole point.
Want me to look at your exact setup? Book a free AI SEO strategy session and we’ll map out where memory pays off fastest for your business.
The honest take
This is the kind of edge that doesn’t stay free forever.
Right now, giving your AI a permanent memory costs nothing but a few minutes of wiring.
The people who do it now, while it’s free and new, build a shared brain that gets smarter every single day.
Everyone else keeps re-explaining themselves to a goldfish.
I know which side I’d rather be on.
FAQ
What is Hermes Obsidian memory?
It’s wiring the free Hermes agent to a free Obsidian vault so Hermes gets permanent, reusable memory. Obsidian holds your notes, goals, client folders and past chats as plain markdown files, and Hermes reads that vault before every job, so it always starts with the full picture of your business.
Is Hermes Obsidian memory actually free?
Yes. Obsidian is free and is just markdown files and folders. Hermes is free and open source and runs the tasks. There’s nothing to buy to get a permanent memory layer working between the two.
How do I wire Hermes to Obsidian?
Set up your Obsidian vault locally with your notes, goals and client folders, then tell Hermes: “I’ve got my Obsidian set up locally, please use that for memory and context.” From then on every Hermes job starts by reading the vault.
What is the shared brain across AI agents?
The same Obsidian vault can be read by Hermes, Claude, OpenClaw, Gemini and Antigravity. Because they all read the same notes, they align, speak in one voice and stop clashing. One agent drops a note and another reads it the next morning.
When should I use Hermes with memory versus a normal chat?
Use the memory setup for the work that matters, like your email list, client work, content strategy and copywriting, anywhere it should sound like you. For one-off questions, a normal chat is fine.
Also on our network
- Hermes Obsidian Memory on juliangoldie.co.uk
- Hermes Obsidian Memory on goldstarlinks.com
- Hermes Obsidian Memory on goldie.agency
About Julian
I’m Julian Goldie, founder of Goldie Agency, a 7-figure SEO and link-building agency with a team of 70+.
I share AI, automation and SEO with 400K+ subscribers on YouTube and 163K followers on X, and I wrote the book “Link Building Mastery”.
I also run the AI Profit Boardroom, a community of 3,600+ members building agentic systems like the Hermes Obsidian memory setup in this guide.
The bottom line: hermes obsidian memory is the cheapest, fastest upgrade you can give your AI right now, and wiring a free agent to a free vault turns a forgetful chatbot into a shared brain that knows your business and gets smarter every day.
📺 Video notes + links to the tools 👉
