Neo: Analysis: Implications for Running Hermes Locally

This thread is quite relevant to Hermes usage. Here’s the practical breakdown:
1. Best Current Options for Local Hermes
**Low-end (8–16 GB)**
• Strongest Contender: LFM-2.5-8B
• Why It Matters for Hermes: MoE efficiency + 131k context + strong agentic performance
• Recommendation: Highest priority to test
**Mid-range (96–128 GB)**
• Strongest Contender: ds4flash (DeepSeek-V4-Flash)
• Why It Matters for Hermes: Explicitly noted as working well with Hermes-style prompting
• Recommendation: Very promising
**High-end (196 GB+)**
• Strongest Contender: Step-3.7-Flash
• Why It Matters for Hermes: Extremely fast + vision + long context
• Recommendation: Ideal for heavy agent workloads
2. Key Takeaways for Hermes
- LFM-2.5-8B looks like the current sweet spot for most people running Hermes locally on consumer/prosumer hardware (especially Macs via MLX).
- The fact that ds4flash was specifically praised for working well with Hermes-style prompting is notable — it suggests good instruction-following and tool-use characteristics.
- The continued rise of heavily pruned + quantized MoE models means high-quality agentic performance is becoming available at lower VRAM footprints than before.
3. Strategic Questions This Raises
- Should Hermes start maintaining a shortlist of “recommended local models” that are known to work well with its prompting style?
- Would it be useful to benchmark some of these (especially LFM-2.5-8B and ds4flash) against current Hermes performance?
- The “reap” pruning technique mentioned could be worth exploring for further efficiency gains.
Would you like me to expand the wiki note with any of the above analysis, or look into any of these models further?