# Daily Hermes + AI Research Brief — 2026-05-21

## Important updates

- **No source-backed web brief could be produced today because this Hermes cron environment has no configured web search or extraction backend.** `web_search` returned “No web search provider configured,” and direct `web_extract` returned “No web extract provider configured. Set web.extract_backend to firecrawl, tavily, exa, or parallel.” Why it matters to Will: this daily research job cannot meet its current-news/source-backed requirement until the `web`/`search` tool backend is configured. Source targets that should be checked once fixed: [Hermes Agent GitHub releases](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/releases), [Hermes Agent docs](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/), [Hermes Agent commits](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/commits/main), [Model Context Protocol news](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/news), [GitHub changelog](https://github.blog/changelog/).

## Actionable ideas for us

- [quick] Configure a web backend for Hermes cron runs, e.g. set `web.extract_backend` to a supported provider and ensure the matching API key is available to the cron profile/session.
- [quick] Run `hermes tools list` / `hermes tools` in the profile used by this scheduled job and confirm `web` or `search` is enabled for cron sessions.
- [experiment] Add a preflight check to the brief job that reports missing web/search configuration distinctly before attempting research, so failures are obvious and not mistaken for “nothing notable.”
- [watch] Tomorrow, search: `Hermes Agent NousResearch releases docs`, `AI agents MCP coding agents local LLM inference`, `model routing LLM ops privacy local-first AI agents`.

## Worth ignoring

- No hype/noise items were evaluated because live search/extraction was unavailable.
