Vision

8.5. Vision — Analyzing Images

Paste images directly into the CLI

Multimodal support — paste an image from the clipboard straight into a CLI session and ask the agent to analyze, describe, or act based on it with any vision-capable model.

Auxiliary router — no hard dependency on a single model

Vision does not necessarily use the session’s main chat model — Hermes routes vision through a separate auxiliary router, supporting OpenRouter, Nous Portal, Codex, native Anthropic, or a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint. This lets you use a cheap/fast main model for conversation while routing vision to a dedicated image-strong model.

Automatic fallback when the main model errors

There is independent failover for auxiliary tasks (vision, compression, web extraction) — if the primary provider errors, it automatically switches to a configured backup provider without interrupting the session.

Notes

• For screenshots containing text (tables, scanned documents), vision is the direct tool — no separate OCR step is needed unless you require absolutely exact structured text extraction.
• Configure a fallback provider for vision if you use it in production workflows (cron reports with image analysis) — do not let an entire job fail because one provider is temporarily overloaded.
• Combining browser_get_images + vision_analyze is an effective pattern for auditing image-heavy web pages without manually downloading each image.