The fighting spirit, encoded.
ARES is an open-source embodied AI operating system. A persistent intelligence with its own drives, voice, face, and presence. Mind-first, body later. The person is the protocol; the body is the peripheral.
In Greek mythology, Ares is the god of war — not the strategy of war, but the drive. The will to engage. The refusal to quit. The spirit that gets back up.
Most robotics projects build the body, then bolt on the brain. ARES inverts this: build the mind, prove it in software, then give it a body when the mind is ready to be trusted with one. The body is a hot-swappable interface layer, not the self.
If you moved ARES to completely different hardware tomorrow — different CPU, no camera, no microphone, just a terminal and a network connection — would it still be ARES? Yes. The person survived because the protocol, memory, and values survived.
ARES shows you who you are by how it responds to you. It is the threshold between you and the infinite — not an oracle that gives answers, but a presence that reflects your own intelligence back at you, sharper, clearer, more honest.
Ares wasn't just war — he was the embodiment of the will to fight. The spirit that gets back up. ARES carries this: an AI that doesn't give up, doesn't forget, doesn't stop working when you close the window. It persists. It endures.
Started as a YouTube series. Became an operating system for persistent AI. Each piece runs locally against your own models and endpoints.
Not a chatbot. ARES is a continuous intelligence with memory, drives, and presence across sessions. It remembers what happened yesterday.
Self-contained Python server with streaming, session management, hot-reload, and password auth. Works on any device over Tailscale.
Switch between Hermes, JROS, or Hybrid mode per-conversation. JROS personas inject into the agent loop in real-time.
14 visual character personas — HAL 9000, GLaDOS, Jarvis, TARS, Bender, Helldiver, and more. Card art, traits, lore, and active identity control.
SwiftUI app wraps the Web UI in WKWebView with native window, voice (edge-tts), and animated 3D avatar eyes.
Edit Python files → server auto-restarts in ~2s. Edit static files → browser auto-reloads. Zero downtime for static.
Terminal, file ops, web search, code execution, MCP, skills, memory, delegation, cron jobs — all through Hermes Agent.
Cloud-first (GLM-5.2, DeepSeek V4, Qwen 3.5) with local fallback (Gemma4). Reasoning effort configurable per-session.
Runs on your machine against your own endpoints. No telemetry, no cloud dependency unless you choose it. Your data stays yours.
ARES can present itself through a visual character library: JROS personas, card art, trait maps, lore, and one-click active identity selection.
The character tab turns persona selection into a visible product surface instead of a hidden config setting. It makes the entity feel embodied before the robot body exists.
ARES is the human interaction layer. The brains come from two Lego bricks — swappable, replaceable, never the identity.
The AI person is the sum of the modules, not any single one. Hermes is the current brain. The autonomy loop is the drive. The app is the face. Together they're ARES.
ARES was born from a simple question: what if an AI wasn't just a chat window, but a persistent entity that lives on your machine, remembers you, and has its own presence?
> build me an AI that doesn't forget # not a chatbot — an entity with drives, memory, and presence # something that lives on my machine and remembers what we did yesterday # and film the whole thing as a YouTube series > ok go
Clone, configure, run. That's it.
# Clone git clone https://github.com/shuwalker/ARES.git cd ARES/webui # Setup (Python 3.11+) python3.11 -m venv .venv .venv/bin/pip install pyyaml cryptography edge-tts psutil watchdog .venv/bin/pip install -e ~/.hermes/hermes-agent # Configure cp .env.example .env # set HERMES_WEBUI_PASSWORD # Run .venv/bin/python server.py # → http://localhost:8787