Vision is one of the hardest problems in autonomous AI. Screenshots, diagrams, UI mockups, whiteboard photos — each type of image is best handled by a different model. Hermes Agent’s vision pipeline handles this diversity automatically.
Multi-Model Vision Routing
When Hermes encounters an image, it routes it to the best-fit vision model based on image type, resolution demands, context requirements, and speed needs:
const analysis = await agent.analyzeImage({
image: "/screenshots/bug-report.png",
question: "What error is shown in the UI?",
});The agent picks the model, not the user.
Automatic Provider Detection
The pipeline includes an auto-detect mode that reads each provider’s vision capabilities from configuration. If a provider supports vision, the pipeline knows. If it doesn’t, vision tasks won’t route to it. This extends to custom endpoints — add any OpenAI-compatible vision provider and the pipeline probes its capabilities automatically.
Local Input Credential Safety
When an image is processed locally, the pipeline ensures image data never touches a cloud provider’s network, local handlers never access cloud credentials, and the credential guard applies even for local vision models. Recent commits hardened this further by routing all local image inputs through the shared read guard.
The Image Generation Pipeline
Beyond analysis, Hermes supports image generation across providers — FLUX for high-quality art, SDXL/DALL-E for photorealism, local models for private generation. Each provider has its own capability profile and the pipeline routes accordingly.
Real-World Vision Workflows
- Bug report analysis — screenshot → identify error → search codebase for the issue
- UI diff comparison — before/after screenshots → identify visual regressions
- Diagram understanding — architecture diagram → extract component relationships
- Document OCR — scanned document → extract text → process as context
The vision pipeline makes all of this autonomous. Give it a set of screenshots and a goal, and Hermes handles the rest — routing each image to the right model, protecting credentials, and aggregating results.