Hermes Agent wrote a novel.

The Second Son of the House of Bells arrived like a quiet experiment that turned into something fully formed. Nous Research announced on X that Hermes Agent produced a 79,456-word novel across 19 chapters, and the result reads like the outcome of a careful, iterative craft process rather than a single bolt of inspiration.

Hermes Agent reportedly built a complete pipeline, using the ame modify-evaluate-keep/discard loop inspired by @karpathy’s Autoresearch, but applied to fiction. That included world-building, chapter drafting, adversarial editing, Opus review loops, LaTeX typesetting, cover art, audiobook generation, and even landing page setup. It’s the sort of end-to-end workflow people tinker with in late-night coding sessions, except this one delivered a full novel (yes, with cover art and audio, too).

For readers curious to see the release and the implementation, the book and code are linked from the announcement. The deep link to the original post is here: https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2034734063928426685. The book is available at https://t.co/V1lIPkhHmX, and the code repository is shared at https://t.co/HR91XrPgh2.

It’s tempting to get lost in technicalities, but the compelling bit is simple: a system that iterates, critiques, and refines produced something you could read from start to finish. For people who’ve tried automated pipelines for smaller projects, this feels familiar (and a bit thrilling). For writers and builders, it suggests new collaborations between human taste and machine scale, where each pass polishes rather than replaces the voice.

Look ahead and imagine more experiments like this, where tools handle routine, repeatable work, leaving humans to steer tone, nuance, and heart. That’s a hopeful place to land, and this project makes that future feel a little closer.