🎭 Hermes Agent integration verified — 254 agents, lazy-router plugin

[pandaliu00]

Hermes Agent Integration Report

Just verified that The Agency works perfectly with Hermes Agent — an open-source AI agent runtime by Nous Research.

What we tested

1. Ran scripts/convert.sh --tool hermes — generated the Hermes lazy-router plugin with 254 agents across 17 divisions
2. Ran scripts/install.sh --tool hermes — installed the plugin to ~/.hermes/plugins/agency-agents-router/
3. Verified plugin loads in Hermes — 4 tools registered: agency_agents_search, agency_agents_inspect, agency_agents_load, agency_agents_delegate
4. Verified data integrity — all 254 agents have valid slug/name/description/body fields (3.4M chars of specialist instructions)

Key design highlight

The Hermes integration uses a lazy-router pattern — a single plugin with 4 tools, with the full 254-agent roster stored on disk in data/agents.json and loaded on demand. This avoids polluting Hermes' startup skill catalog while keeping the full roster searchable.

Hook for improvements

During testing, I noticed a minor YAML formatting issue in the install script's config patching when plugins.enabled had mixed indentation. The convert/build side (build-hermes-plugin.py) is solid — no issues there.

Thanks for building such a great cross-platform agent format standard! 🎭

[msitarzewski]

Thank you for such a thorough verification report, @pandaliu00 — the step-by-step (convert → install → plugin load → data-integrity) is exactly the kind of testing we love to see, and the lazy-router pattern read is spot on. 🎭

Two things worth flagging back to you:

Your bug find is real and already has a fix in flight. That plugins.enabled mixed-indentation issue in the install-side config patching — nice catch. #689 fixes precisely that. We'll get it landed.

Your report predates a couple of significant Hermes upgrades (you tested on the 254-agent snapshot; we're at 263 now), so a re-test would show a meaningfully better integration:

• fix(hermes): expose Agency tool parameters #717 — the big one: the generated tools now expose full parameter schemas. Before this, Hermes registered them as zero-argument functions, so models called search with no query and inspect/load with no agent id. If your delegate/load calls felt awkward, that's why — and it's fixed now.
• fix(hermes): accept slug alias + derive divisions from divisions.json (#665) #666 — the roster now derives from divisions.json by construction, so it never drifts (a healthcare division had been silently dropped before). Also added a slug alias so search → load(slug=...) chains cleanly.
• Plus a new check-hermes-plugin.py CI guard that builds + loads the plugin and validates all four schemas on every PR, so this stays solid.

If you're up for re-running convert.sh --tool hermes on current main, I'd genuinely love your read on the tool-calling flow now. Thanks again for the deep dive! 🙏