Hermes Agent Bot Mode

“Bot” means four different things around Hermes. Most confusion in search results comes from mixing them up:

The pieces combine: a Bot Mode bot is a profile, and that profile can also run its own messaging gateway so the same bot answers in Telegram.

• Open Hermes Desktop and switch the left sidebar from Sessions to Bots. While the Bots tab is active, a Routines pane docks beside the conversation.
• Bot Mode is a bundled Desktop plugin. If the tab is gone, check Capabilities → Plugins → Bots; switching it off removes the roster and Routines pane live without touching your profiles, sessions, or cron jobs.
• Bot Mode was bundled starting with the v0.20.3 tag (August 17, 2026). An older Desktop build will not have it — update Desktop first.
• Bot Mode is a Desktop feature. The terminal CLI, TUI, and web dashboard have no roster view, but they reach the same bots through profiles (see CLI parity below).

Click New Agent in the roster. The quick path is three fields — Name, Title, Description — and the bot introduces itself as the first message of its new Bot Chat. Advanced exposes:

• Clone from an existing profile (config, skills, SOUL.md, memory) or start fresh; Create empty skips bundled skills.
• Model & provider pin — different bots can run different models side by side; leave it unset to inherit.
• Custom SOUL.md for persona and standing instructions.
• Per-skill, per-toolset, and per-MCP-server enablement.
• Copy API keys from the main profile (on by default). Static API keys are copied; OAuth logins such as Anthropic, OpenAI Codex, and xAI are not — sign the bot in separately with hermes -p <name> auth add <provider>.

Each bot has one canonical Bot Chat that is meant to last forever. Typing /new or /reset there is rerouted to /compact (fresh working context, same conversation). Ordinary sessions on the same profile still get a normal /new.

Because a bot is a profile, it has its own copy of everything a profile isolates. This is also why a bot does not “know” what your main agent remembers — see Hermes memory for how per-profile memory works.

• @mentions: type @researcher have a look at this in any chat. The mentioned bot writes its own message with the message_agent tool — your text is not forwarded verbatim — and the reply comes back attributed.
• Direct messages: every canonical Bot Chat carries message_agent. Delivery is queued; a queued acknowledgement confirms admission, not a finished reply.
• Group chats: rooms hold 2–6 bots. One message triggers at most 3 serial rounds of member turns with a cap of 10 messages per send, and the room settles when a full round stays silent. Put stop next to a mention (stop @bot) to hold that member.
• Across machines without Desktop: hermes peer lets bots on one gateway message bots on another gateway directly.

# Register another machine's gateway as a peer
$hermes peer add spark --url http://spark.lan:8377 --key <API_SERVER_KEY>
$hermes peer list
$
# Send a DM whose body comes from a file
$hermes peer dm spark/researcher < ~/.hermes/cache/scratch/dm.txt

Each local bot runs in its own backend process. Desktop keeps at most Settings → Advanced → Warm Bot Backends alive at once — default 3, roughly 60 MB each. Idle backends are reaped after 10 minutes by default. Opening a bot while every slot is busy waits up to 30 seconds and then fails with timed out waiting for a free local slot; raise the setting if you run large group chats.

The official docs note that an exited (1) line in desktop.log right after an idle-reap message is that cleanup, not a crash. Earlier Desktop builds could spawn a backend per profile on every roster refresh; the v0.21.2 release (September 11, 2026) lists that “spawn storm” as fixed.

Register several backends under Settings → Connections — the local runtime, remote gateways, SSH hosts, or Hermes Cloud instances — and the roster shows bots from all of them. Duplicate names get device handles such as @research-homelab. A bot's chats, memory, and routines stay on the machine that owns its profile; Desktop relays messages between connections while it is running. The Create on picker in New Agent creates a bot directly on another connected machine.

Bot Mode does not keep bots online by itself. A bot whose profile lives on your laptop stops when the laptop sleeps. For always-on bots, the profile has to live on an always-on machine — see Hermes hosting options.

• Started as a separate public-beta Desktop plugin in the NousResearch/Hermes-Bot-Mode repository.
• v0.20.3 (August 17, 2026): the Bot Mode plugin is bundled with Hermes.
• v0.21.0 (August 31, 2026): headlined as built in and default-on, alongside hermes peer bot-to-bot DMs and cron jobs that keep memory between runs.
• v0.21.2 (September 11, 2026): backend spawn-storm fixes for Bot Mode rosters.