NousResearch/hermes-agent v2026.7.1

Hermes Agent v0.18.0 (2026.7.1) — The Judgment Release

Repository: NousResearch/hermes-agent

Tag: v2026.7.1

Published: 2026-07-01T20:08:06Z

Prerelease: no

Release notes:

Hermes Agent v0.18.0 (v2026.7.1)

Release Date: July 1, 2026 Since v0.17.0: ~1,720 commits · 998 merged PRs · 2,215 files changed · ~251,000 insertions · ~41,000 deletions · 949 issues closed · 370+ community contributors

> The Judgment Release. Over the last week and a half the team put nearly all of its effort into one goal: resolve every P0 and P1 issue and PR in the entire Hermes Agent repo — and as of this release, 100% of them are closed. Zero open P0s. Zero open P1s. That's ~700 highest-priority items cleared as part of ~1,950 total issues and PRs closed this window. We intend to keep P0/P1 at zero from here on. > > On top of that clean-sweep, v0.18.0 is about how *well* Hermes thinks and how it *knows when its work is actually done*. Mixture-of-Agents became a first-class citizen — named ensembles of models you can pick like any other model, with every reference model's reasoning shown to you and the aggregator's answer streamed live. The agent learned to verify its own work against evidence instead of vibes, /goal gained completion contracts, and /learn + /journey turned self-improvement into something you can see and steer. Underneath, the gateway became genuinely deployable-at-scale (scale-to-zero, drain coordination), the desktop grew first-class coding projects and a playable memory graph, and subagents can now fan out in the background.

🎯 The P0/P1 Clean Sweep — 100% resolved

This is the release headline. For a week and a half the team hammered the priority backlog day and night, and every single P0 and P1 across the whole repo is now closed:

| Priority | Issues closed | PRs merged | |---|---|---| | P0 (critical) | 3 | 8 | | P1 (high) | 493 | 188 | | Total | 496 | 196 |

That's ~692 highest-priority items resolved in twelve days — and at the moment the sweep completed, the open P0/P1 count hit 0 across the entire repo. The final cluster to fall was the interrupt-protected-compression sibling-fork bug (issue #56391) and its fix (#56416), closed on an all-nighter right before this release cut.

Special shoutout to @kshitijk4poor, who burned through the priority backlog day and night alongside the core team — the cron reliability wave, the compression-fork fix, the credential-exfil hardening, and a huge share of the P1 closures are his.

We're keeping P0/P1 at 0 from here forward. 🫡

✨ Highlights

• Mixture-of-Agents is now a first-class model you can pick — MoA used to be a mode you toggled; now every named MoA preset shows up as a selectable model under a moa provider, right alongside Claude, GPT, and Grok in every model picker (CLI, TUI, desktop, gateway). Pick "my-council" the same way you'd pick any model, and Hermes routes your prompt through that ensemble automatically. An ensemble of frontier models deliberating on your hardest questions is now one selection away, on every surface. (#46081, #53548, #53561 — @teknium1)

• See every model's reasoning, then watch the answer stream in — When a MoA ensemble runs, each reference model's full output now renders as its own labelled block — you can read what GPT-5 thought, what Claude thought, and what Grok thought, before the aggregator synthesizes them into one answer. And that final answer now streams to you live instead of appearing all at once after a long silence. This works in the CLI, the TUI, and the desktop app. You get to watch the committee deliberate, not just read the verdict. (#53793, #53855, #55625, #56101 — @teknium1)

• The agent verifies its own work — "done" means proven, not claimed — Hermes now records verification evidence for coding work and can decide it's finished by actually running your project's checks, not by asserting success. /goal gained completion contracts: you state what "done" looks like, and the standing-goal loop judges completion against that evidence instead of stopping when the model feels like it. There's a pre_verify hook for wiring in custom checks and a one-time migration that tunes the defaults sensibly. The difference between "I think I fixed it" and "the tests pass, here's proof." (#50501, #52285, #55413, #53552 — @teknium1, @OutThisLife)

• `/learn` — turn anything into a reusable skill by describing it — Run /learn and Hermes distills a reusable skill out of whatever you point it at — a directory, a URL, or just the workflow you walked it through five minutes ago. It writes the skill to the standards in your CONTRIBUTING.md automatically. The next time you need that workflow, it's already there. Teaching Hermes a new trick is now a single command, not a manual skill-authoring session. (#51506, #52372 — @teknium1)

• `/journey` — a playable timeline of everything Hermes has learned about you — The CLI and TUI gained /journey, a learning timeline that shows the memories and skills Hermes has accumulated over time — and you can edit or delete any of them right from the view. Pair it with the desktop's new memory graph (a top-down, playable radial timeline of memories and skills) and for the first time you can actually *see* what your agent knows, watch it grow, and prune what's wrong. Your agent's memory stops being a black box. (#55555, #55859, #55226 — @OutThisLife)

• Delegate a pile of work and keep going — background fan-out —...