📌 Copy my personal AI system to save time and build with AI: https://www.behindthecraft.com/ 🤝 Get my free AI newsletter read by 150K+ professionals: https://creatoreconomy.so/ Karan co-founded Nous Research, the company behind Hermes, the #1 personal agent and AI app overall on OpenRouter. I found him incredibly down to earth as we discussed why open-source AI must win, how Hermes gets better the more you use it, and even a live demo of how Hermes can mod your favorite childhood games. Karan and I talked about: (00:00) How Hermes differs from Claude Code and Codex (02:20) Why every AI model now sounds exactly the same (11:16) How to stop AI from saying “you’re absolutely right” (15:16) How Hermes creates skills without bloating its context (16:40) The open vs. closed-source debate on AI safety (23:40) Using one Kanban board for humans and AI agents (26:45) Demo: Rebuilding a childhood Sonic world with Hermes (36:07) How two Discord friends built a self-improving agent (42:40) How Hermes became its own biggest contributor Thanks to our sponsors: Riverside: All-in-one AI studio for podcasts and video https://creators.riverside.com/PeterYang Linear: The AI agent platform for modern teams https://linear.app/behind-the-craft Wispr Flow: 4x faster than typing with your voice https://ref.wisprflow.ai/peteryang 📌 Get the takeaways: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/hermes-co-founder-on-building-an-ai-agent-that-improves-itself-karan-malhotra Where to find Karan: X: https://x.com/karan4d Website: https://www.karan4d.com/ Hermes Agent: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent Subscribe to this channel - more interviews coming soon!