Wednesday, 19 August 2026 at 17:00
Encode Hub, 41 Pitfield St, London, N1 6DA
# Hands-on workshop on how to use the fastest open-source AI Agent Hermes & hook it up to a local LLM for maximum privacy Registration to this event is only valid through the Luma platform: https://luma.com/axzt5ade Hello code campers! Since everyone is talking about using AI Agents and in-line to with our tradition of looking mainly at open-source, we will be looking at Hermes-Agent, the new OpenClaw alternative that seem to be gaining steam. Like all the other AI harnesses, to make it useful this will need to be configured to communicate to an AI runner to running open LLM models (from Qwen3.6 35B-A3B, *27B,* the new Qwen3.8 by the time of this event, and lower down to Qwen3.5 4B and 9B models depending on your hardware). Come and join us and learn what is the deal with all the open-source large language models (LLMs), such as Qwen/Gemma/GLM/Deepseek, etc., everyone's been talking about and see them run across various local-first environments. We will go through the setup process, focusing on how to install the desired LLM runner like Ollama or LMstudio locally. This will be our 8th event in our series of local-first, open-source AI events and since it is very hot AC and various types of refreshments will be provided. This workshop is open to all levels, from beginners to experts. Bring your laptop (make sure it's fully charged as local LLMs tend to be power-hungry), and don't forget to bring your coding gear (hoodie). We are delighted to announce that we are going to be accompanied by a guest speaker for the Hermes workshop: Shritesh Jamulkar (LinkedIn). Shritesh is a software engineer at Booking.com with 5+ years of experience who has spent recent months building self-hosted AI agents on the Hermes framework, running entirely on local Qwen models with no cloud dependency. In this session, he'll set up a Hermes agent live, running on a local Qwen model with a memory layer (mem0 backed by pgvector and Neo4j), and walk through how it compares to OpenClaw for building personal AI that stays on your own machine, showing what solo developers can build today, and how the same setup scales into multi-agent systems. • ## Agenda for the evening (Subject to change) 18:00 - 18:30 Arrival and networking Mingle with fellow developers over refreshments. 18:30 - 18:45 Introductions Intro and a bit of audience engagement 18:45 - 19:15 Workshop - Setting up locally Hands-on technical workshop (if you are non-technical it's OK, tag along). 19:15 - 20:15 Workshop - Hermes agent with Shritesh 20:15 - 20:30 Guest speaker 20:30 - 21:00 Networking 21:00 - Closing remarks and follow-up END: Carry on the fun at a nearby pub which is right @ the corner. • ## Event Venue As always we'd like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Encode Club. Encode Club has spent over five years fostering a global community of developers, researchers, and founders in Web3, AI, and emerging technologies. The Encode Hub brings everything together under one roof, providing a dedicated environment for collaboration and innovation through meetups, co-working, and in-person events.
View event details →Listed from meetup. Details can change — always check with the organiser.