Why does my Hermes agent ignore instructions even though it has API access and web search?
I’m building a Hermes agent that analyzes marketplace listings. The setup is fairly straightforward: it receives a marketplace link as input, has access to the marketplace API to fetch listing details, and can also use web search. The intended flow is to extract all relevant product information from the link, find comparable listings on the market, and then perform a structured comparison including price, condition, and key specifications. The final output should be a simple score from 0 to 10, where 0 means a bad deal and 10 means a very good deal.
In practice, the agent often doesn’t behave as expected. Sometimes it stops after acknowledging the task, sometimes it asks for confirmation instead of continuing, and other times it ignores the available tools entirely. Even when it does proceed, the output is usually incomplete and lacks proper market comparison.
I’m trying to understand what typically causes this kind of behavior. Is it usually a prompting issue, a tool routing or agent architecture problem, missing constraints in the output format, or something specific to how Hermes handles execution? Any practical debugging advice would help.