Nous Research Ships Bot Mode for Hermes Agent, Turning Agent Profiles Into a Roster of Named Bots

Nous Research has shipped Bot Mode for Hermes Agent, its MIT-licensed open source agent, and the change is bigger than the name suggests. Instead of one generic session list, Hermes Desktop now shows a roster of bots, each tied to a real Hermes profile with its own chat, memory, skills, and pinned model.

That profile-first design keeps the system simple. A bot lives under ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/, and the plugin mostly wraps tools Hermes already had: profiles RPCs for creating and editing, image generation for avatars, and cron jobs that still show up in the normal Hermes cron list. Bot-to-bot handoffs are literal CLI messages into a persistent Agent Inbox, with @mentions used to pass work along.

The rollout moved quickly. Teknium launched Bot Mode as a one-day public beta plugin, asked for bug reports, and said it would be folded into the desktop app. That’s now done. Bot Mode ships bundled and default-on inside Hermes Desktop in Hermes Agent v0.20.3, and the standalone repository is archived while development continues in-tree.

There’s also a clear line on who this is for. Solo builders, startups, and small-to-mid engineering teams can adopt it right away, and the source is blunt that enterprises should treat it as a workstation tool, not managed infrastructure. There’s no admin console, no SSO, no central audit log, and no policy layer, so regulated buyers will need to build their own controls around it.

The new grouped mode adds a bit more choreography. Bots can be organized into labeled sections that sync across machines, and group chats can open a shared room for two to six bots with up to three serial rounds of replies. A scout can ping a reviewer, a reviewer can ping a publisher, and the whole thing stays inside one Hermes roster instead of spreading across separate tools.