Provider Credential Pools and Failover Planning

Hermes can work with many model providers. The practical question is not only “which model is best?” It is also “what happens when auth fails, quota is exhausted, or a provider is down?”

What to plan

• Primary provider for normal work
• Backup provider for urgent work
• Separate credentials for personal, business, or production contexts
• Budget limits and expected usage
• Model choices for coding, research, vision, writing, and low-cost tasks

Useful commands

hermes model
hermes auth
hermes auth list
hermes doctor

Credential hygiene

Do not paste API keys into chat, screenshots, wiki pages, or social posts. Use the Hermes auth flow or environment configuration as appropriate. If a secret appears in public output, rotate it.

Failover design

A fallback model should be good enough for the workflow. For example, a low-cost model may be fine for summarizing public articles, while code edits or security reviews may require a stronger model.

Verification

After adding or changing credentials, run a small non-sensitive prompt and confirm the configured provider responds. For production workflows, record the model/provider used in run logs.