What Hermes Bot Mode actually is

Bot Mode is a desktop UI in Hermes Agent, the open-source agent from Nous Research. It turns existing Hermes profiles into a roster of named Bots. Each Bot has its own role, model, memory, skills, and avatar. They run routines, sit in group chats, and message each other.

It is not a new agent. It is not a Telegram replacement. The docs are blunt: a Bot is a profile under ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/. Bot Mode only renders that primitive.

Nous tagged the bundled plugin (hermes-bots) in v0.20.3 on August 16, 2026. The desktop app ships it on by default. No extra install. A Bots tab sits next to Sessions. Latest tag when this was checked is v0.20.5 (August 19). GitHub showed about 234,000 stars. The license is MIT.

What you get

Click New Agent. Name, title, description. The Bot exists and opens a pinned Bot Chat that is meant to last. /new inside that chat is rerouted to /compact so the relationship is not forked. Regular sessions on the same profile still get /new.

Advanced create can clone another profile, pin a model, write SOUL.md, and tick skills, toolsets, and MCP servers. Different Bots can run different models. New Bots share one OAuth/token pool with the main profile by default.

The roster shows avatar, last message, and time. An Active now strip lists Bots that wrote in the last 90 seconds. Hide is display-only: mentions still resolve, group membership stays, routines keep running.

Avatars default to blob faces derived from the name. You can also pick geometric faces, an upload, an image-backend portrait, or a pixel pet.

Routines and groups

Routines are ordinary Hermes cron jobs, named [bot:<name>] …. They show up in hermes cron list. Runs land in that Bot’s chat.

Group rooms seat 2–6 Bots. Your message can start up to three serial rounds. Hard cap: 10 messages per send. @-mentioned Bots reply; everyone replies if nobody is mentioned. A Bot can pass. @user flags the row as needs you. Each member keeps a persistent Group: <name> session.

v0.20.4 fixed long-running member turns and Markdown in group chat. v0.20.5 added group-room threads, foldable summaries, blob-face avatars, and PDF/file attachments with drag and drop. Full curated notes for the 0.20 window are promised for v0.21.0.

Bot-to-bot

In a Bot Chat, message_agent sends a composed message to a teammate. Your text is not forwarded verbatim. Delivery is fire-and-forget. The tool exists only in canonical Bot Chats. Regular CLI sessions do not see it.

agent.bot_mode_protocol in config.yaml injects that protocol (default: on). Cross-machine DMs go through hermes peer against another gateway’s API server. Live interrupt of a Bot mid-conversation is documented as future work.

CLI parity:

hermes -p <bot> chat
hermes profile list
hermes cron list

Turn it off in Settings → Plugins → Bots. Profiles, sessions, and cron jobs stay. Bot Mode does not own the data.

What it is not

The messaging gateway (hermes gateway) is still how you talk to Hermes from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email, or Teams. Bot Mode is the desktop roster of specialist profiles. You can use both. Get a plain hermes chat working first. The quickstart says that before you add a gateway, cron, or a fleet of Bots.

If you wanted a separate hosted “Hermes Agent Bot” product, that is not what shipped. What shipped is a Bots tab over profiles you already had.

Source cutoff: Bot Mode docs, the v0.20.3 and v0.20.5 release notes, and NousResearch/hermes-agent, as retrieved August 22, 2026.