Hermes Bot Mode (Desktop Plugin)¶

Status: Ships built into the Hermes desktop app and is on by default -- no install needed. Announced Aug 16, 2026 by Nous Research. Official docs: hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/bot-mode Repo: github.com/NousResearch/Hermes-Bot-Mode (MIT, JavaScript) -- the original standalone plugin, now bundled into the app and archived upstream. Type: Desktop UI over the profile primitive. 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. It appears as a Bots tab next to Sessions in the left sidebar, with a Routines tile docked beside the conversation while that tab is active.

What it does¶

Bots tab - left-side roster, one row per agent profile with avatar, latest message preview, timestamp. Click to enter its chat. The roster searches as you type, and right-click gives "open recent session".
Active now - activity filter over the roster: the owner of the focused live turn, bots that wrote in the last 90 seconds, and bots with a recent worker heartbeat. A connected gateway alone does not mean a bot is working.
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, so they show up in hermes cron list
Bot-to-bot messages are real CLI handoffs between profiles -- the same agent hermes -p <bot> chat opens -- and across connected machines they route through the Desktop relay

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¶

Nothing to install. Open the Hermes desktop app and use the Bots tab; Bot Mode is on by default. From a terminal, hermes -p <bot> chat opens the same agent, and that bot's routines appear in hermes cron list. Bots live under ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/, so config, memory, skills, and credentials stay where they always were.