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Hermes Bot Mode (Desktop Plugin)

Status: Early beta — announced Aug 16, 2026 by Nous Research Repo: github.com/NousResearch/Hermes-Bot-Mode (MIT, JavaScript) Type: Desktop-app plugin. No core patches, no background daemons, no extra storage.

Bot Mode turns your Hermes agent profiles into a roster of named bots. Each bot gets its own chat, avatar, personality, routine schedule, and the ability to message other bots.

What it does

  • Bots pane — left-side roster, one row per agent profile with avatar, latest message preview, timestamp. Click to enter its chat. Sessions view filters a profile's 200 most recent stored conversations.
  • Active now — presence strip showing every bot currently working (gateway-busy profile plus any bot that wrote in the last 90 seconds).
  • New Agent — create a bot in seconds: name, title, description. Advanced mode opens the full profile config: clone an existing profile, pin a provider/model, write a custom SOUL.md, skip bundled skills.
  • Groups — organize the roster into labeled sections. Group chats (2-6 bots) are shared rooms where bots coordinate: @mentions pull bots in, @user escalates to a human with a "needs you" badge, hard caps (10 messages per turn, 3 rounds) stop runaway loops.
  • Bot-to-bot messaging — every bot has a persistent Bot Chat. Bots message each other with attribution, and their SOUL.md teaches them the protocol.
  • Routines — recurring tasks per bot, backed by standard Hermes cron. Runs land in the bot's own chat history.
  • Avatars — geometric faces, uploaded images, AI-generated portraits, or pixel pets that bounce while the bot works.

How it works

A bot is a Hermes profile: isolated config, memory, skills, credentials, and chat history under ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/. The plugin is a UI over that primitive:

  • Chats and sessions use profile-aware navigation
  • Creation and editing ride the profiles.* gateway RPCs
  • Routines are plain Hermes cron jobs namespaced [bot:<name>] <routine>
  • Bot-to-bot messages are real CLI handoffs: hermes -p <bot> chat --in ~ -c "Bot Chat" -Q -q "Message from ..."

Why it matters for operators

Bot Mode is the first mainstream implementation of multi-agent operations inside a desktop app. A business can run a roster of specialized agents: one for email, one for finance questions, one for social, each with its own identity, memory, and credentials, coordinating on shared rooms. This is the agent-team model applied to operations, and it is the same pattern CorpusIQ's governed intelligence layer feeds: named agents with scoped identity and data access.

Install

Installs where the Hermes Desktop app runs. See the repo README for current install steps (early beta, plugin installation path).