NousResearch/hermes-agent v2026.8.31

Hermes Agent v0.21.0 (v2026.8.31)

Repository: NousResearch/hermes-agent

Tag: v2026.8.31

Published: 2026-08-31T19:29:49Z

Prerelease: no

Release notes:

Hermes Agent v0.21.0 (v2026.8.31)

Release Date: August 31, 2026 Since v0.20.0: ~5,800 commits · ~2,475 merged PRs · ~5,680 files changed · ~869,000 insertions · ~135,000 deletions · ~2,100 issues closed · 760+ contributors

> The Pantheon Release. v0.20.0 made Hermes the herald — he spoke, and he carried word to other agents. In v0.21.0 the gods assemble. Bot Mode ships built into the desktop app: a society of named agents with their own faces and group chats, where your bots talk to each other — and to you — like a team, not a toolbox. Around that spine: cron jobs gained memory and continuity so scheduled agents actually learn between runs, subagents can be steered live mid-flight, the MCP surface became a real command center, and the agent can now drive the desktop's own browser. This release rolls up everything from the v0.20.1–v0.20.6 infrastructure patch tags — those windows are fully documented here.

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✨ Highlights

• Bot Mode — your agents become a society, built in — Bot Mode is now a bundled, default-on part of the desktop app: every agent profile gets a name, a deterministic avatar face (with randomize/lock controls), and a place in a shared roster. Create Discord-style group chats where multiple bots and you talk in one room, @-mention any bot from the composer, and give rooms names and pictures. Before, "multi-agent" meant plumbing; now it looks like a chat app full of coworkers. (#87886, #88243, #89386, #96726 — @teknium1, @OutThisLife, @dokterdok)

• `hermes peer` — bot-to-bot DMs between your agents — Any Hermes agent can now message any other by handle, across profiles and gateways, from the CLI or from inside a conversation. Ask your research bot to hand findings to your coding bot and get the reply back where you can read it. Replies land in each agent's canonical Bot Chat, so conversations between agents are durable and inspectable, not fire-and-forget. (#88725, #88178, #91487 — @teknium1)

• Cron jobs that remember — Scheduled jobs stopped being goldfish. Cron agents now load and update persistent memory like every other agent, continuity=true carries each run's output into the next (so a monitor can dedupe against what it already reported), every job gets a durable notepad scratchpad, monitor-mode jobs skip the LLM entirely when nothing changed, and cron output can land in a bot's canonical Bot Chat — where the bot actually responds. Your 9am briefing job now knows what it told you yesterday. (#91447, #80774, #81139, #81138, #91487 — @teknium1, @smwbev)

• Steer your subagents while they run — delegate_task gained live orchestration: list running children, steer one mid-flight with a course correction, or stop it early and keep the partial result. Add optional JSON-schema validation on child outputs, per-delegation cost surfaced in results, and raised defaults (250 iterations, 10 concurrent children) — delegation went from fire-and-pray to actually managed parallel work. (#85232, #81144, #81142, #86506, #86745 — @teknium1)

• The MCP command center — MCP servers and the catalog merged into one coherent desktop page with drag-in "paste anything" import, background health checks that nudge you to re-auth before a tool call fails, a fleet cost/usage overlay showing schema token estimates and 30-day usage per server, and hermes:// deep links that install an MCP server with explicit confirmation. Managing twenty MCP servers used to be config-file archaeology; now it's a dashboard. (#87525, #87572, #87576, #87579, #87581 — @teknium1)

• A CLI power wave — Ctrl+P opens a fuzzy command palette, the /model picker filters as you type, /status shows reasoning mode, pending approvals, and context usage, and the status bar can display live cache-hit %, latency, and tokens/sec with per-field toggles. Plus: a global emergency stop, session pin/unpin, rotating task-oriented composer placeholders — and Ghostty-level terminal pets, because a companion should have a companion. (#90730, #90717, #90745, #98250, #98282, #97666 — @teknium1, and salvaged community work)

• The agent drives the desktop's browser — The in-app browser stopped being a window the agent could only look at: Hermes now navigates, clicks, and reads it directly, and pages can be popped out to your system browser with full link context menus. Ask it to walk a docs site or debug a web app and watch it happen inside your own app. (#90197, #89366 — @OutThisLife, @ethernet8023)

• Six new providers and a model catalog wave — Meta Model API (Muse...