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Your first launch

Type your name and Hermit downloads its model by itself. There's no account and no email.

One question

Hermit opens on “your almighty intern.” and four short facts: Runs offline, No account, Keys on this phone (this Mac), Nothing leaves it. Under them it asks one thing: What should Hermit call you?

Type your first name and tap the arrow. That’s the whole sign-up. There’s no email, no password and no account, because there’s no server of ours to log in to. Your name stays on the device, and you can change it later in Settings, Profile.

The model downloads by itself

Hermit’s AI runs on your device, so it needs its model. The download starts on its own as soon as you’re in:

Model	Size	Who gets it
Hermit 1.2	About 2.3 GB	Every Mac, and iPhones with about 7 GB of memory or more (iPhone 15 Pro and newer)
Hermit 1.1 Lite	About 1 GB	iPhones with 6 GB of memory, like the iPhone 14 and 15

On a Mac you can switch to Lite later if you’d rather leave more memory for your other apps. An iPhone with 4 GB, like the iPhone 12 or 13, can’t run either model. On those, chat through Private Cloud.

If your iPhone is on mobile data, Hermit asks first: Download Hermit’s AI now? Tap Download now, or Wait for Wi-Fi and it starts by itself the next time you’re on Wi-Fi.

Watching it come down

The model’s name sits next to Send in the chat box, with the progress beside it: Hermit 1.2 42%. Tap it and choose On-device models to see the Models sheet, with the size so far (“540 MB of 2.27 GB”) and a Pause button. A paused download reads “Paused at 540 MB of 2.27 GB” and shows Resume, which picks up from where it stopped.

On iPhone there’s a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, so you can lock the phone and walk away. It reads, in order:

Landing on your phone
Downloading in the background (iOS is moving the bytes while Hermit is asleep)
Checking the files
Landed. Hermit works offline now.

If you pause it, it says “Paused. Open Hermit to continue.” If it gives up, it says “Download stopped. Open Hermit to retry.”

Using Hermit while you wait

Everything else works while the model downloads. You can make your wallet and add funds right away. If you chat before the model is in, Hermit tells you where it is:

Hermit 1.2 is still downloading (42%). Ask me again when it’s done.

Or switch the chat to Private Cloud from that same menu next to Send.

How the download works

We wanted a 2.3 GB download to survive a train tunnel, and we wanted you to be sure you got our model and nothing else.

The big file comes down in 128 MiB pieces, 8 at a time.
Hermit sends a tiny test request to models.hermit.my (our mirror on Cloudflare) and to Hugging Face, and uses whichever answers faster. If a piece fails from one, it gets that piece from the other.
Every piece is checked against a SHA-256 hash that’s built into the app, and so is every whole file. A piece that doesn’t match is thrown away and fetched again. No mirror can swap in a different model.
The model is pinned to one exact Hugging Face commit, so a later change to the repo doesn’t change what you get.
On iPhone the pieces go to iOS’s background downloader, so they keep going while Hermit is in the background. If you quit Hermit, the next launch only fetches the pieces that are missing.
A dropped connection isn’t a failure. Hermit waits for the network and tries again three times before it says the download stopped.
Before the first byte, it checks your free space. If there isn’t enough, you’ll see “Not enough space. Hermit needs 2.7 GB free and this iPhone has 1.1 GB. Free up some space, then try again.” with your own numbers.

The model files are kept out of your device backups. Model and tools has the hashes and what the model is built on.

Stuck at the same percent for a long time? Troubleshooting has the fixes. Otherwise, go make your wallet.