Releases: NousResearch/hermes-agent
Release list
Hermes Agent v0.20.5 (v2026.8.19)
Hermes Agent v0.20.5 (v2026.8.19)
Release Date: August 19, 2026
Patch release. This tag rolls up the ~323 PRs merged since v0.20.4 into a stable tagged release for downstream consumers (Docker images, hosted deployments, fresh installs).
About this release
Since v0.20.4 (v2026.8.18, tagged August 18), this window landed ~746 commits across ~1,250 files (+111,500 / −20,701) — ~323 merged PRs including Bot Mode group-room threads, foldable conversation summaries, blob-face avatars, and PDF/file attachments with drag & drop; the keyless web tier (5-vendor free rotation with ring failover, web search on fresh installs with zero keys); a CLI polish wave (fuzzy /model picker, Ctrl+P command palette, richer /status); execution-discipline and runtime stall guards from the Composio eval findings; hermes update receipts and fleet --plan verification; hermes worktree list/prune; the opencode-free zero-auth provider; multi-question clarify; desktop perf work (paint-first Bot Mode hydration, compositor spinners, React Compiler in both renderers); and cron jobs gaining persistent memory and per-job reasoning effort.
Full curated release notes for this window will ship with v0.21.0, which will document everything from v0.20.0 onward — highlights, feature areas, and complete contributor credits. Nothing in this window is skipped.
Updating
hermes updatefrom an existing install- Fresh install:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
Full Changelog: v2026.8.18...v2026.8.19
Hermes Agent v0.20.4 (2026.8.18)
Hermes Agent v0.20.4 (v2026.8.18)
Release Date: August 18, 2026
Patch release. This tag rolls up the ~74 PRs merged since v0.20.3 into a stable tagged release for downstream consumers (Docker images, hosted deployments, fresh installs).
About this release
Since v0.20.3 (v2026.8.16.2, tagged August 17), this window landed ~146 commits across ~265 files (+21,697 / −2,217) — ~74 merged PRs including the desktop glass/translucency surface work (matte glass, frost picker, macOS pre-select), the tabbed SESSIONS|BOTS sidebar with per-bot hide/unhide, Bot Mode group-chat fixes (long-running member turns, Markdown rendering, cross-machine routing), NVIDIA SkillEvaluator Tier 1 advisory scanning on skill installs (license + security checks), cron media-send hardening (configurable timeout, manual-run attachments, missed-fire surfacing), SessionDB event-loop-thread and contention fixes, hermes update parked-branch honesty, and kanban native OS notifications.
Full curated release notes for this window will ship with v0.21.0, which will document everything from v0.20.0 onward — highlights, feature areas, and complete contributor credits. Nothing in this window is skipped.
Updating
hermes updatefrom an existing install- Fresh install:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
Full Changelog: v2026.8.16.2...v2026.8.18
Hermes Agent v0.20.3 (2026.8.16.2)
Hermes Agent v0.20.3 (v2026.8.16.2)
Release Date: August 16, 2026
Patch release. This tag rolls up the ~125 PRs merged since v0.20.2 into a stable tagged release for downstream consumers (Docker images, hosted deployments, fresh installs).
About this release
Since v0.20.2 (v2026.8.16, tagged earlier today), this window landed ~250 commits across ~461 files (+42,613 / −1,641) — ~125 merged PRs including the MCP 2.x SDK migration and 2026-07-28 stateless protocol support, the bundled Bot Mode (hermes-bots) plugin with the core teammate protocol, the CommandCode provider plugin, subprocess Python runtime ownership hardening (PYTHONHOME/PYTHONPATH isolation), Cua Driver 0.20 runtime contracts for computer use, kanban worktree/dispatch fixes, cron continuity flags, desktop remote-gateway headers and connection self-healing, cron scheduler self-heal (EMFILE recovery, stale-claim reconciliation, wedged-job re-arm), session handoff data-loss fixes, plus a wave of ports from the ecosystem scout slate (plugin install security scanning, /worktree, /rollback hand-edit preservation, UTF-16 file reads, Gemini 3 tool-call ID preservation, and more).
Full curated release notes for this window will ship with v0.21.0, which will document everything from v0.20.0 onward — highlights, feature areas, and complete contributor credits. Nothing in this window is skipped.
Updating
hermes updatefrom an existing install- Fresh install:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
Full Changelog: v2026.8.16...v2026.8.16.2
Hermes Agent v0.20.2 (2026.8.16)
Hermes Agent v0.20.2 (v2026.8.16)
Release Date: August 16, 2026
Patch release. This tag rolls up the ~397 PRs merged since v0.20.1 into a stable tagged release for downstream consumers (Docker images, hosted deployments, fresh installs).
About this release
Since v0.20.1 (v2026.8.13, tagged August 13), this window landed ~967 commits across ~1,279 files (+128,522 / −7,622) — ~397 merged PRs of fixes and improvements spanning the desktop app (multi-gateway Connections registry, profile-scoped refreshes, MCP health checks and deep links), the CLI (Windows update probes, Kitty keyboard protocol, chat -c hardening), the gateway (persisted model routes, /loop completion, Telegram DM topics), prompt caching for LiteLLM Claude on the OpenAI wire, cron hardening, auth resolution through profile scopes, and installer robustness on both Linux and Windows.
Full curated release notes for this window will ship with v0.21.0, which will document everything from v0.20.0 onward — highlights, feature areas, and complete contributor credits. Nothing in this window is skipped.
Updating
hermes updatefrom an existing install- Fresh install:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
Full Changelog: v2026.8.13...v2026.8.16
Hermes Agent v0.20.1 (2026.8.13)
Hermes Agent v0.20.1 (v2026.8.13)
Release Date: August 13, 2026
Patch release. This tag rolls up the ~656 PRs merged since v0.20.0 into a stable tagged release for downstream consumers (Docker images, hosted deployments, and anyone installing from the latest tag).
About this release
Since v0.20.0 (August 3), this window landed 1,444 commits across ~656 merged PRs, touching 2,172 files (+233,872 / −75,244), and closed ~481 issues. It is a broad stabilization-and-fixes rollup spanning the desktop app, gateway platforms, installers, tool system, and provider catalogs.
Full curated release notes for this window will ship with v0.21.0, which will document everything from v0.20.0 onward — highlights, feature areas, and complete contributor credits. Nothing in this window is skipped.
Updating
- Existing installs:
hermes update - Fresh install: see the installer one-liner in the README
Full Changelog: v2026.8.3...v2026.8.13
Hermes Agent v0.20.0 (2026.8.3)
Hermes Agent v0.20.0 (v2026.8.3)
Release Date: August 3, 2026
Since v0.19.0: ~3,650 commits · ~1,400 merged PRs · ~5,200 files changed · ~559,000 insertions · ~405,000 deletions · ~1,200 issues closed · 650+ contributors
The Herald Release. Hermes is the herald of the gods, and this release makes him one in earnest: he speaks (real-time conversational voice with streaming TTS, barge-in, on-device wake words, and hands-free control across the CLI, desktop, and every audio-capable gateway platform), he carries word to other agents (A2A v1.0), he announces events to your systems (signed outbound webhooks), and he cites his sources (grounded research with verifiable citations and fact-checking). Around that spine: the desktop app became a platform (artifacts with live preview, a plugin SDK, quick-entry from anywhere, multiple windows), the CLI got a wave of power commands (
!shell mode,/init,/diff,/context,/focus), compression got smarter and gentler, and the tools themselves now recover from their own failures instead of making the model guess. This release rolls up everything from the v0.19.1 infrastructure patch tag — that window is fully documented here.
✨ Highlights
-
Talk to Hermes — streaming, conversational voice with barge-in — Voice mode used to mean: speak, wait for the whole reply to generate, then listen to one long audio file. Now Hermes speaks clause-by-clause as the response streams, you can interrupt it mid-sentence by just talking (it stops, listens, and the model is told you cut in), and busy-aware silence detection means it doesn't talk over you. This works in CLI voice mode, on the desktop, and through gateway adapters. Talking to Hermes finally feels like a conversation, not a voicemail exchange. (#69511, #73862, #74223, #74000, #69602 — @teknium1, @OutThisLife)
-
Wake words and hands-free control — Say your own open-vocabulary wake phrase ("hey Hermes", or anything you pick) and Hermes starts listening — detection runs on-device, so no audio leaves your machine while it waits. Multi-profile voice routing means different wake words can reach different profiles, and saying "stop" ends the voice chat on every surface without touching the keyboard. Your terminal is now something you can talk to from across the room. (#70509, #73106, #73933 — @teknium1)
-
Voice on every platform — Send a voice note to Hermes on WhatsApp, Feishu, DingTalk, LINE, QQ, Photon, or Weixin and it's transcribed and answered; auto-TTS replies are delivered platform-aware (opus where platforms want opus, captions attached correctly). STT is now fully configurable — its own
hermes toolscategory, GUI toggles, dashboard dropdowns, unified language resolution so transcripts stop coming back in the wrong language, and OpenAI's gpt-transcribe support. One unified spoken-text preprocessor cleans markdown, code, and URLs out of speech across all TTS providers. (#73515, #73508, #73910, #73513, #73067 — @teknium1) -
Research you can trust — grounded citations with fact-checking — The new
grounded-citationsskill makes Hermes produce research where every claim is backed by a verifiable source: quotes are matched against the actual page text (not hallucinated), citations link to the exact evidence, and a fact-checking mode turns the same machinery on any document or claim you hand it — it tells you what checks out, what doesn't, and what couldn't be verified. If you use Hermes for research, this is the difference between "sounds right" and "provably sourced." (#71698, #77104 — @teknium1) -
Outbound webhooks — Hermes pushes events to your systems — Until now, integrating with Hermes meant polling or listening on a platform. Now Hermes pushes signed lifecycle events (session activity, turn completions, tool events) to any HTTP endpoint you register — with HMAC signatures so your receiver can verify authenticity. Wire Hermes into your CI, your home automation, your dashboards, or any service that speaks HTTP, with no polling loop. (#69406 — @teknium1)
-
The desktop app becomes a platform — artifacts, plugin SDK, quick entry — Hermes desktop now renders artifacts: versioned cards with sandboxed live preview in a right-rail viewer, so generated HTML/apps run safely next to the chat. A real plugin SDK landed with Kanban as its founding plugin,
ctx.downloadfor handing users files, floating pane placement, and multiple GUI windows. A global-hotkey quick-entry window captures a thought into any session from anywhere in your OS. The desktop stopped being a chat client and started being a workbench. (#72345, #61173, #74413, #72315, #68259, #73143 — @OutThisLife, @teknium1) -
Hermes speaks Agent-to-Agent — A2A v1.0 — A new bundled plugin implements the Agent-to-Agent protocol, so Hermes can discover, talk to, and be driven by other A2A-compatible agents. This closes issue #514 — one of the oldest open feature requests in the repo. If you're building multi-agent systems with heterogeneous stacks, Hermes now has a standard wire protocol for joining them. (#77109 — @teknium1)
-
CLI power-user wave —
!commandruns a shell command instantly without spending a model turn./initscans your project and generates (or updates) anAGENTS.md./diffshows staged/all/session changes from any surface,/contextbreaks down exactly what's filling your context window,/focusgives you a reduced-output view with hidden-line recovery, and Ctrl+S stashes a half-written prompt into a browsable panel. Plushermes import-agentmigrates your Claude Code or Codex CLI setup into Hermes in one command. (#72257, #72178, #72240, #72242, #72302, #72262, #72190 — @teknium1, several salvaging long-standing community PRs) -
Correct the agent mid-turn — redirects — If Hermes is heading the wrong way, you no longer have to
/stopand re-explain. Type a correction while it works and the active turn is redirected: work in flight is preserved, the original prompt is kept, and the agent course-corrects with your new guidance. Paired with double-ESC draft discard and a composer undo stack, steering feels like editing, not restarting. (#63104, #72339, #74736 — @OutThisLife) -
Tools that fix themselves — A sweep of self-recovery upgrades means the agent wastes far fewer turns on tool friction: truncated terminal output spills to a file the agent can read back,
patchdetects already-applied edits and diagnoses whitespace mismatches,write_fileverifies content on disk, searches that match nothing probe for near-misses and recover, and common failure classes come back with actionable hints. The default tool-calling iteration limit also jumped 90 → 500 — long autonomous runs stopped hitting an artificial wall. (#77041, #76998, #77024, #77055, #77011, #76992, #72176 — @teknium1) -
Compression that respects your conversation — Context compression got a deep overhaul: proactive tool-result pruning for large-window models, per-turn micro-compaction that amortizes the cost instead of one giant pause, a guaranteed N-user-message tail so recent conversation always survives, progress-aware timeouts that stop punishing slow summary models, and ghost-skill defense so a pruned skill can never silently haunt a session. Thresholds are now configurable per-model and in absolute tokens. Long sessions stay coherent and stop stalling. (#70254, #75345, #70250, ...
Contributors
Assets 2
Hermes Agent v0.19.1 (v2026.7.30)
teknium1
Teknium
Hermes Agent v0.19.1 (v2026.7.30)
Release Date: July 30, 2026
Patch release. This tag rolls up the ~1,000+ PRs merged since v0.19.0 into a stable tagged release for downstream consumers (Docker images, hosted deployments, fresh installs).
About this release
Since v2026.7.20 (v0.19.0, July 20): ~2,789 commits · ~4,748 files changed · ~442,000 insertions · ~392,300 deletions on main. This window is dominated by bug-fix and salvage waves across the gateway, voice subsystem, desktop app, and installer, plus continued platform work (Buzz/Nostr channel, FLUX3 video generation and delivery, Telegram media reliability, voice-mode regressions).
Full curated release notes for this window will ship with v0.20.0, which will document everything from v0.19.0 onward — highlights, feature areas, and complete contributor credits. Nothing in this window is skipped.
Updating
hermes update
# or fresh install:
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bashFull Changelog: v2026.7.20...v2026.7.30
Hermes Agent v0.19.0 (2026.7.20) — The Quicksilver Release
teknium1
Teknium
Hermes Agent v0.19.0 (v2026.7.20)
Release Date: July 20, 2026
Since v0.18.0: ~2,245 commits · ~1,065 merged PRs · ~2,465 files changed · ~300,000 insertions · ~36,000 deletions · ~3,300 issues closed · 450+ community contributors
The Quicksilver Release. Hermes is the messenger god, and this window we made him move like it. First-turn time-to-first-token dropped ~80% on every platform, reasoning streams live by default, the desktop app got a ~20-PR speed overhaul (14× faster streaming markdown, virtualized diffs, snappy session switching), and the TUI renders markdown incrementally. Around that speed spine: you can now manage your Nous subscription without leaving the terminal, plug Bitwarden and 1Password straight into Hermes, let smart approvals judge flagged commands for you by default, watch your subagents work live, and trust that a finished response survives a gateway crash thanks to a durable delivery ledger. This release also rolls up everything from the v0.18.1 and v0.18.2 infrastructure patch tags — those windows are fully documented here.
✨ Highlights
-
Hermes got dramatically faster — first token in a fraction of the time — Cold-start "Initializing agent..." used to eat ~4.3 seconds before your first turn even reached the model; it's now ~0.9s, an ~80% cut that applies to the CLI, gateway, TUI, desktop, and cron alike. Round 2 attacked what you see while waiting: reasoning models now stream their thinking live by default (no more staring at a spinner for 30 seconds), and the response box paints per token instead of per line. If Hermes ever felt like it took a deep breath before answering, that breath is gone. (#59332, #59389 — @teknium1)
-
The desktop app speed wave — 20+ targeted perf PRs — Long replies used to cost 14× more CPU in the markdown splitter than they do now; giant diffs froze the review pane until we virtualized it; switching sessions thrashes layout no more. Streaming no longer re-renders the sidebar and every tool row per token, profile backends pre-warm on hover intent, and boot-hidden panes mount at idle instead of on the cold-start critical path. The net effect: the desktop app feels like a native app under load, even with huge transcripts and busy agents. (#67154, #67818, #65898, #66033, #66747, #67742 and more — @OutThisLife)
-
Manage your Nous plan from the terminal —
/subscriptionand/topup— Changing your subscription used to mean a trip to the billing website. Now/subscriptionopens a full flow right in the TUI or classic CLI: see your plan and remaining allowance, preview exactly what an upgrade costs ("Pay $46.30 & upgrade now") or when a downgrade takes effect, and apply it — with scheduled-change banners and undo. The desktop app got a matching billing settings tab. Your wallet never has to leave the keyboard. (#51639, #61054, #61067 — @alt-glitch) -
Smart approvals are now the default — When Hermes wants to run a flagged command, an LLM reviewer now assesses it independently instead of asking you to approve every single one — and each verdict covers only that exact command, so a later command matching the same pattern gets its own review. Combined with the new user-defined deny rules (which block commands even under yolo mode) and
/deny <reason>(which tells the agent why you refused so it course-corrects), day-to-day approval fatigue drops sharply without giving up control. (#62661, #59164, #54518 — @teknium1) -
Plug your password manager into Hermes — Bitwarden & 1Password secret sources — API keys no longer have to live in a plaintext
.env. A new pluggableSecretSourceinterface lets Hermes fetch secrets from Bitwarden and 1Password (op://references) at load time, with multiple vaults enabled simultaneously, deterministic precedence, conflict warnings, and per-variable provenance. This consolidated eleven competing community PRs into one orchestrated interface — future vault providers drop in as plugins. (#59498 — @teknium1, 1Password provider salvaged from @hwrdprkns) -
Watch your subagents work — live transcripts + durable background delegation —
delegate_taskdispatches now return live transcript files you cantail -fthe moment the subagents launch: every tool call, result, and streamed reply, one human-readable log per child. And background delegation completions are now durable — if the process restarts mid-run, results are restored and delivered through an ownership-checked ledger instead of vanishing. Fan out a fleet, watch any worker live, and never lose the results. (#67479, #63494 — @teknium1) -
A finished answer can no longer be lost — the delivery-obligation ledger — If the gateway died between generating your response and confirming the platform actually delivered it, that answer used to be silently gone (and you'd paid for the turn). Final responses are now recorded in a durable ledger in
state.dbaround the platform send and redelivered on the next boot — closing a P1 silent-loss window for Telegram, Discord, Slack, and every other channel. (#67181 — @teknium1) -
One gateway, many profiles — profile-based message routing — A single multiplexed gateway sharing one bot token can now route specific guilds, channels, or threads to different profiles — each with fully isolated config, skills, memory, and secrets. Point your work Discord server at the
workprofile and your hobby server atpersonal, from one bot. A second multiplex hardening wave means one misconfigured profile can no longer take down the whole gateway. (#64835 salvaging @Burgunthy, #65700, #60589 — @teknium1, @benbarclay + six salvaged contributors) -
New providers and the newest frontier models — Fireworks AI and DeepInfra land as first-class providers (Fireworks with cost estimation and a #2 slot in the provider picker), Upstage Solar joins via salvage, and the model catalogs picked up GPT-5.6 (Sol/Terra/Luna + Pro variants, wired end-to-end across every route), grok-4.5 (GA), moonshotai/kimi-k3, claude-fable-5 / claude-sonnet-5, and GA tencent/hy3 — plus LM Studio JIT model loading for local setups. (#62593, #63969, #61616 — @kshitijk4poor completing @rob-maron's #61578, #60887, #65913, #64541, #65472)
-
Crank the thinking to max — new reasoning effort tiers and per-model control — Reasoning effort gained
maxandultralevels (GPT-5.6 and Codex's top tiers), selectable everywhere from the CLI to the desktop, with sane clamping on providers with smaller scales. You can now also pin per-model reasoning-effort overrides in config, set per-slot effort in MoA presets (your advisors think hard, your synthesizer stays fast), and per-task effort for auxiliary models. Thinking depth is now a dial, not a global switch. (#62650, #64458, #64631, #64597 — @teknium1) -
Your sessions, your data — export everything —
hermes sessions exportnow writes Markdown, Quarto, HTML, prompt-only, and even Hugging Face-ready trace formats, with the full filter surface (age, workspace, platform), an opt-in--redactsecret-scrubbing pass, and compacted-session lineage stitched into one logical export. Pair with the new prune filters and bulk archive to keep your session store tidy. Your conversation history is a real dataset now, not a black box. (#60186 salvaging @web3blind, #60492, #60507, #59327 — @teknium1) -
Security hardening round — This window closed a long list of credential-surface gaps: Vertex credentials scoped away from subprocess env and through profile secret scopes, media/vision/image-gen local-file reads routed through one shared credential-read guard, a webhook body-size-cap sweep across every aiohttp server, bot-token redaction in Telegram transport errors, Fireworks token prefixes added to the redactor, six P1 bro...
Contributors
Assets 4
Hermes Agent v0.18.2 (2026.7.7.2)
teknium1
Teknium
Hermes Agent v0.18.2 (v2026.7.7.2)
Release Date: July 7, 2026
Same-day patch on top of v0.18.1, picking up the WhatsApp Baileys dependency fix needed for tagged-release Docker builds.
What's in this patch
- fix(whatsapp): unpin Baileys from git commit, use published 7.0.0-rc13 (#60643) — the WhatsApp bridge dependency now installs from the published npm release instead of a pinned git commit, making installs and Docker image builds reliable.
Full curated release notes for the entire post-v0.18.0 window ship with v0.19.0.
Updating
hermes update # existing installs
pip install -U hermes-agentFull Changelog: v2026.7.7...v2026.7.7.2
Hermes Agent v0.18.1 (2026.7.7)
Hermes Agent v0.18.1 (v2026.7.7)
Release Date: July 7, 2026
Patch release. This tag rolls up the ~660 PRs merged since v0.18.0 (July 1) — bug fixes, hardening, and in-progress feature work — into a stable tagged release for downstream consumers (Docker images, hosted deployments, PyPI installs).
About this release
This is an infrastructure-driven patch tag rather than a fully curated release. Since v0.18.0 shipped six days ago, main has accumulated roughly 667 commits across ~990 files (+89.5k/−10.4k lines), including installer/updater self-healing on Windows, dashboard and gateway fixes, WhatsApp dashboard pairing, MCP and provider fixes, and a large volume of stability work.
Full curated release notes for this window will ship with v0.19.0, which will document everything from v0.18.0 onward — highlights, feature areas, and complete contributor credits. Nothing in this window is skipped; it's documented in the next minor release.
Updating
hermes update # existing installs
pip install -U hermes-agentFull Changelog: v2026.7.1...v2026.7.7