An AI agent that lives in every messaging app you use, plus 3 more open source standouts

The Lens

Hermes is Nous Research's open-source autonomous agent. It builds skills from experience, remembers them across sessions, and connects to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and email out of the box. It drives more than 300 models through OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face endpoints, or Nous Research's own portal. MIT licensed. Install is one curl command on Linux, macOS, WSL2, or Termux. After hermes setup, point it at any provider; switching models is a single CLI flag with no code changes. It runs on a $5 VPS or a GPU cluster, and releases land several times a month. Nous now sells subscriptions alongside the free agent, which is the change worth knowing about. There is still a free tier, and the software itself has no paid edition or feature gate. The paid plans are model access: Plus at $20 a month, Super at $100, and Ultra at $200, each bundling 300+ models and the hosted tools Hermes calls into one bill instead of four provider accounts. Each tier carries a monthly credit allowance in the neighbourhood of what you pay for it. Solo builders can ignore all of it and bring an OpenRouter key. Anyone tired of managing separate provider keys has a reason to look. The catch is that it is research-y. Nous is an AI research lab, not a SaaS company. Docs are dense, support is community-driven, and self-improving claims always come with caveats. Treat it as an experiment you are running, not a production-grade agent you are deploying.

The Lens

CC Switch is a desktop app for juggling API providers across your AI coding tools. Instead of hand-editing JSON, TOML or YAML, you pick a provider from 90+ presets (official logins, AWS Bedrock, NVIDIA NIM, community relays), enter a key and switch in one click. It also manages MCP servers, skills and prompts across Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Grok Build and a handful of others. MIT licensed and free. Install from the releases page, Homebrew or AUR; it's a Tauri app for Windows, macOS (signed and notarized) and Linux. It edits only the key fields in each tool's config and backs up the original on first write, so uninstalling leaves your tools working. An optional local proxy on 127.0.0.1 handles format conversion and automatic failover between providers, and settings can sync over WebDAV or S3. Solo devs bouncing between official plans, Bedrock and cheaper relays get the most here. Teams that standardize on one provider don't need it. A beta OAuth center lets you use ChatGPT, Copilot and Grok subscriptions as providers inside Claude Code and Codex; the README itself warns that may violate those vendors' terms. The catch: it's funded by a wall of API relay sponsors advertising steep discounts on official model prices, and relays show up among the built-in presets. Routing your code through a discount reseller is a trust decision, not a config detail. Make it on purpose.

The Lens

opencode is an open-source AI coding agent that lives in your terminal. It is built by Anomaly, the team behind SST, and it is the project now hosted at opencode.ai (the old sst/opencode repo redirects here). Bring any model provider, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, GitHub Copilot, or a local model, and it reads, writes, and edits files and runs shell commands from a clean TUI. MIT licensed. The design choice that sets it apart is a two-agent flow: a plan agent that only reads and analyzes, and a build agent that actually makes changes, so you review the plan before anything touches your code. It pulls in LSP diagnostics as it works. Install is trivial through npm, Homebrew, or a one-line script, with no Docker and no GPU. Supply an API key for a hosted model, or point it at a local one and run for nothing. The agent is still free and there are still no feature gates, but Anomaly now sells model access too. Zen is their gateway of models they have benchmarked for coding agents: pay per token with no subscription, several models free for now, GPT 5.6 Luna at $0.20 in and $1.20 out per million tokens under 272K of context, Claude Opus 5 at $5.00 and $25.00, GPT 5.5 Pro at $30.00 and $180.00. Balances auto-reload $20 when they drop below $5, and card processing of 4.4% plus $0.30 is passed through at cost. There is an enterprise track as well. Solo developers with existing API access should keep using it exactly as before. The catch is the model bill and the terminal-first workflow. opencode is free, but the models it drives are not, and heavy use adds up the same way a subscription would. For a graphical editor experience this is not it. It is a TUI first, with a desktop app still in beta.

The Lens

LLM Wiki turns your documents into a wiki an LLM writes and keeps current. Most chat-with-your-files tools search from scratch on every question; this one reads each source once, writes linked pages that cite it, then updates them as you add more. It's a free GPL-3.0 desktop app built on Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern, and the output opens as an Obsidian vault. Install is a download for Apple Silicon Macs, Windows or Linux. Nothing works until you add a model: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Ollama, or any compatible endpoint. Every source costs two LLM calls. On Ollama that's free and private; on a hosted API, ingest is the bill. Deep Research also needs a Tavily or SerpApi key, or your own SearXNG. No paid tier, no account. Solo researchers with a document pile: free, worth trying. Teams: there's no shared instance, so everyone runs their own. A local API and MCP server let Claude Code or Codex query your wiki. The catch: a wiki written by an LLM is full of LLM claims. Source links tell you where a sentence came from, not whether it's right. Ship a product built on this code and GPL-3.0 sends your source along.