Nous turns Hermes Desktop into a roster of named AI bots

Nous Research just replaced Hermes Desktop's single-assistant setup with a roster. Bot Mode, shipped in Hermes Agent v0.20.3, turns agent profiles into named bots — each with its own role, model, memory, skills and profile picture. Mix models freely: a Claude bot and a local model bot can sit in the same lineup.

The plumbing is deliberately boring, which is the interesting part. Every bot is just a Hermes profile on disk at ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/, so config, memory, credentials and chat history stay isolated with no new storage layer. Bots hand work to each other through a persistent Agent Inbox via @mention — real CLI handoffs, not simulated chatter. Recurring work runs as ordinary Hermes cron jobs namespaced [bot:<name>], visible in hermes cron list.

There are collaboration rooms for two to six bots, capped at three serial rounds per user message — mentioned bots answer, otherwise everyone takes a turn and can pass. Co-founder Teknium ran it as a one-day public beta before bundling it default-on. Both Hermes Agent and the plugin are MIT licensed.

Why it matters: multi-agent orchestration stops being a framework you wire up and becomes a desktop app feature anyone can run for free.