NousResearch/hermes-agent v2026.5.28

Hermes Agent v0.15.0 (2026.5.28) — The Velocity Release

Repository: NousResearch/hermes-agent

Tag: v2026.5.28

Published: 2026-05-28T17:46:09Z

Prerelease: no

Release notes:

Hermes Agent v0.15.0 (v2026.5.28)

Release Date: May 28, 2026 Since v0.14.0: 1,302 commits · 747 merged PRs · 1,746 files changed · 282,712 insertions · 36,699 deletions · 560+ issues closed (15 P0, 65 P1, 19 security-tagged) · 321 community contributors (including co-authors)

> The Velocity Release. Hermes gets dramatically faster — to start, to run, to ship work, and to grow. The 16,083-line run_agent.py collapses to 3,821 (-76%) across 14 cohesive agent/* modules. Kanban grew into a real multi-agent platform across 104 PRs — orchestrator auto-decomposition, swarm topology, scheduled tasks, worktree-per-task, per-task model overrides. The cold-start perf wave keeps going: another second shaved off launch, 47% fewer per-conversation function calls, hermes --version flipping the head-to-head benchmark against Codex CLI. session_search is 4,500× faster and free now. Promptware defense lands against Brainworm-class attacks. Bitwarden Secrets Manager replaces N per-provider API keys with one bootstrap token. Skill bundles let one slash command load a whole workflow. The Ink TUI gets a multi-session orchestrator. Two new image_gen providers (Krea 2 Medium + Large, FAL ported to plugin), the Nous-approved MCP catalog with an interactive picker, an OpenHands orchestration skill, ntfy as the 23rd messaging platform, and a deep xAI integration round (Web Search plugin, xai-oauth hermes proxy upstream, retired-May-15 model detection + hermes migrate xai, natural TTS speech-tag pauses, base_url leak guard, OpenAI-style execution guidance for Grok). 15 P0 + 65 P1 closures alongside.

---

✨ Highlights

• The Big Refactor — `run_agent.py` is no longer 16,000 lines — The file at the heart of Hermes — the agent conversation loop — has been reduced from 16,083 lines to 3,821 (-76%), with the extracted code redistributed across 14 cohesive modules under agent/. Behavior is unchanged: every extraction keeps a thin forwarder on AIAgent, every test patch path still works, every external caller is compatible. The reason you care: future Hermes development moves faster, plugin authors can finally grep the codebase, and the file that took 90 seconds to load in your editor opens in a blink. (#27248)

• Kanban grew into a real multi-agent platform — 104 PRs end to end — Triage auto-decomposes one task into a tree of sub-tasks. hermes kanban swarm creates a full Swarm v1 graph in one command — root, parallel workers, gated verifier, gated synthesizer, shared blackboard. Tasks support per-task model overrides (cheap models for boilerplate, expensive ones for hard sub-tasks), board-level default workdirs, per-task worktree paths and branches, scheduled start times, configurable claim TTL, retry fingerprinting, stale-task detection, respawn guards, and a drag-to-delete trash zone. Workers report through /workers/active, /runs/{id}, and /inspect endpoints. (#27572, #28443, #28364, #28394, #28462, #28384, #28467, #28455, #28452, #28432, #28468, #28420)

• Cold-start perf wave keeps going — another second saved, 47% fewer per-turn function calls — Three new optimization rounds: defer openai._base_client import (-240ms / -17MB on every CLI invocation), hot-path optimizations cut 47% of per-conversation function calls (399k → 213k for 31-turn chat), defer compression-feasibility check (-170 to -290ms on every agent construction), adaptive subprocess polling (-195ms per tool call, 1+ second per turn). Termux cold start drops from 2.9s to 0.8s. hermes --version cold drops 63% (701ms → 258ms), flipping the head-to-head benchmark against Codex CLI from 5/11 wins to 6/11. (#28864, #28866, #28957, #29006, #29419, #30121, #30609, #31968)

• `session_search` rebuilt — no LLM, no cost, 4,500× faster — The old session_search was an aux-LLM-powered tool that cost ~$0.30/call and took ~30 seconds to summarize three sessions, sometimes confabulating when the right session wasn't even in the FTS5 hit list. The new shape is one tool with three modes (discovery, scroll, browse) inferred from which args are set — no mode parameter, no aux-LLM, no config knob, no companion skill. Discovery is ~20ms instead of ~90s; scroll is ~1ms. Searching your past sessions for context is now free and instant. (#27590)

• Promptware defense — Brainworm-class attacks blocked at three chokepoints — Inspired by recent Brainworm / Promptware Kill Chain research (Origin HQ, arxiv 2601.09625), Hermes now defends the context window against prompt-injection attacks that try to hijack the agent via tool output, recalled memory, or stored skills. Single source of truth (tools/threat_patterns.py) with ~15 new Brainworm/C2 patterns; recalled memory is scanned at load time; tool results get delimiter markers so a malicious file or remote service can't impersonate Hermes' own system content. Paired with a new security-guidance plugin that pattern-matches dangerous code writes.…