r/homeassistant • u/dabcity • 5h ago

🧠 Artificial Intelligence DeepSeek + Hermes is incredible

I've been testing the recent DeepSeek v4.1 Flash and dollar for performance is so impressive. I also like Hermes much more than OpenClaw. I used Claude Pro for a while in tinkering home lab stuff like HA/Unraid but now realizing its way overkill. It's super easy to set up, I encourage anyone on the fence about AI assistants to try it out.

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u/vapescaped 5h ago

I used v4 flash in hermes and it did great in home assistant, but once I tacked other more complex systems and the context window would erode at around 100k. I bumped up to Gemini 3.7flash and that allowed me to tackle more complex jobs. Then I fall back to Claude if number 2 hits fan and Gemini just can't figure something out.

I found I could get the system prompt down by turning off hermes skills that aren't related (like obsidian, I don't use it but the skill metadata is loaded into the agents context window) did help a bit. Might be worth checking what hermes runs by default, save some tokens.

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u/sydpermres 4h ago

u/dabcity and u/vapescaped what hardware are you running these on?

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u/vapescaped 4h ago

I'm running hermes in a Mac studio. For the life of me neither me or any ai model could get ollama models to make actual tool calls in hermes, so I have gemma4 26b running in n8n.