Files

teknium1 8d182ec733 chore: bump version to v0.2.0 + add curated first-release changelog

- Update __version__ to 0.2.0 (was 0.1.0)
- Update pyproject.toml to match
- Add RELEASE_v0.2.0.md with comprehensive changelog covering:
  - All 231 merged PRs
  - 120 resolved issues
  - 74+ contributors credited
  - Organized by feature area with PR links

2026-03-12 01:52:53 -07:00

31 KiB

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Hermes Agent v0.2.0 (v2026.3.12)

Release Date: March 12, 2026

🎉 First official tagged release! Hermes Agent has been in active development since July 2025, with 1,388 commits from 74+ contributors across 231 merged pull requests. This release marks the beginning of regular weekly releases. Everything below represents the full feature set shipping today.

✨ Highlights

Multi-Platform Messaging Gateway — Run Hermes Agent on Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Email (IMAP/SMTP), and Home Assistant, all from a single codebase with unified session management, conversation persistence, and per-platform tool configuration.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) Client — Full native MCP support with stdio and HTTP transports, server reconnection, resource/prompt discovery, sampling (server-initiated LLM requests), and hermes tools UI integration. (#291, #301, #753) — @0xbyt4
Skills Ecosystem — 70+ bundled and optional skills across 15+ categories (research, creative, gaming, smart-home, productivity, MLOps, and more). Skills are data-driven Markdown files with YAML frontmatter — the agent loads them dynamically based on task context. Includes a Skills Hub for community discovery and per-platform skill enable/disable. (#743) — @teyrebaz33
Centralized Provider Router — Unified resolve_provider_client() + call_llm()/async_call_llm() API replaces scattered provider logic. All auxiliary consumers (vision, summarization, context compression, trajectory saving) route through a single code path with automatic credential resolution. (#1003)
ACP (Agent Communication Protocol) Server — VS Code, Zed, and JetBrains editor integration via the agent-protocol standard. (#949)
Reinforcement Learning Environments — Atropos-compatible RL training environments: TerminalBench2 (tool-calling), WebResearchEnv (multi-step web research), YC-Bench (long-horizon agent benchmark), and OpenThoughts-TBLite evaluation. (#17, #434) — @dmahan93, @jackx707
Git Worktree Isolation — hermes -w launches isolated agent sessions in git worktrees, enabling safe parallel work on the same repo without conflicts. (#654)

🏗️ Core Agent & Architecture

Agent Loop & Conversation

Shared iteration budget across parent + subagent delegation to prevent runaway chains
Iteration budget pressure via tool result injection — agent gets warned as it approaches limits
Configurable subagent provider/model with full credential resolution (#609)
Fallback model for provider resilience — automatic retry on a different model when primary fails (#740, #454)
Context compression improvements: retry with rebuilt payload after compression (#616) — @tripledoublev; regression tests for tool-call boundary handling (#648) — @intertwine
Auto-compress pathologically large gateway sessions (#628)
Handle 413 payload-too-large via compression instead of aborting (#153) — @tekelala
Tool call repair middleware — auto-lowercase and invalid tool handler (#520)
Reasoning effort configuration and /reasoning command for effort levels + display toggle (#921)
Default reasoning effort tuned from xhigh to medium

Provider & Model Support

First-class providers: OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Nous Portal, Codex (OpenAI Responses API), Google Gemini, z.ai/GLM, Kimi/Moonshot, MiniMax, DeepSeek, Azure OpenAI, custom endpoints
Nous Portal as first-class provider option in setup (#644) — @Indelwin
OpenAI Codex (Responses API) with OAuth support, ChatGPT subscription Codex (#43) — @grp06
Codex OAuth vision support + multimodal content adapter
Validate /model against live API instead of hardcoded lists
Support for self-hosted Firecrawl instances (#460) — @caentzminger
OpenRouter provider routing configuration (provider_preferences)
Nous credential refresh on 401 errors (#571, #269) — @rewbs
Dynamic max tokens handling for various providers
Kimi Code API support (#635) — @christomitov

Session & Memory

Session naming with unique titles, auto-lineage, rich listing, and resume by name (#720)
Interactive session browser with search filtering (#733)
Display previous messages when resuming a session in CLI (#734)
Proactive async memory flush on session expiry
Session reset policy for messaging platforms
Honcho AI-native cross-session user modeling integration (#38) — @Erosika
/resume command for switching to named sessions in gateway
Smart context length probing with persistent caching + banner display

📱 Messaging Platforms (Gateway)

Native file attachments: send_document + send_video (#779)
Document file processing for PDF, text, and Office files (#153) — @tekelala
Forum topic session isolation (#766) — @spanishflu-est1918
Browser screenshot sharing via MEDIA: protocol
Location support for find-nearby skill
TTS voice message fix — prevent accumulation across turns (#176) — @Bartok9
Improved error handling and logging (#763) — @aydnOktay

Discord

Thread-aware free-response routing (#insecurejezza)
Channel topic included in session context (#248) — @Bartok9
DISCORD_ALLOW_BOTS config for bot message filtering (#758)
Improved error handling and logging (#761) — @aydnOktay
Document and video support (#784)

Slack

App_mention fix + document/video support (#784)
Structured logging replacing print statements — @aydnOktay

Native media sending — images, videos, documents (#292) — @satelerd
Consolidate tool progress into single editable message — @satelerd
Multi-user session isolation and bridge message handling (#75) — @satelerd
Cross-platform port cleanup replacing Linux-only fuser (#433) — @Farukest

Signal

Full Signal messenger gateway via signal-cli-rest-api (#405)
Media URL support in message events (#871)

Email (IMAP/SMTP)

New email gateway platform (#291 area) — @0xbyt4

Home Assistant

REST tools + WebSocket gateway integration (#184) — @0xbyt4
Service discovery and enhanced setup

Gateway Core

Configurable background process watcher notifications: all, result, error, off (#840, #592)
Expose subagent tool calls and thinking to users (#186) — @cutepawss
/compress, /usage, /update slash commands for conversation management
edit_message() for Telegram/Discord/Slack with fallback
Session transcript deduplication fix — eliminated 3x SQLite message inflation (#873)
MCP server shutdown on gateway exit (#796) — @0xbyt4
Stable system prompt across gateway turns for cache hits (#754)

🖥️ CLI & User Experience

Interactive CLI

Data-driven skin/theme engine for CLI customization — banners, spinners, colors, branding
Built-in skins: default (gold/kawaii), ares (crimson war-god), mono (grayscale), slate (cool blue), poseidon, sisyphus, charizard, and custom YAML skins
/personality command with custom personality support + ability to disable default personality (#773) — @teyrebaz33
User-defined quick commands that bypass the agent loop (#746) — @teyrebaz33
/reasoning command for effort level and display toggle (#921)
/verbose slash command to toggle debug output at runtime (#94) — @cesareth
/insights command with usage analytics, cost estimation & activity patterns (#552)
/background command for managing background processes
/help formatting with command categories (#640)
Bell-on-complete — terminal bell when agent finishes (#738)
Up/down arrow history navigation
Clipboard image paste (Alt+V / Ctrl+V)
Loading indicators for slow slash commands (#882)
Spinner flickering fix under patch_stdout (#91) — @0xbyt4
--quiet/-Q flag for programmatic single-query mode
--fuck-it-ship-it flag to bypass all approval prompts (#724) — @dmahan93
Tools summary flag (#767) — @luisv-1

Setup & Configuration

Modular setup wizard with section subcommands and tool-first UX
Interactive setup for messaging platforms in gateway CLI
Container resource configuration prompts
Backend validation for required binaries
Config migration system with version tracking (currently v7)
API keys properly routed to .env instead of config.yaml (#469) — @ygd58
Atomic writes for .env to prevent API key loss on crash (#954) — @alireza78a
hermes tools — per-platform tool enable/disable with curses UI
hermes skills — per-platform skill enable/disable (#743) — @teyrebaz33
Multiple named custom providers
hermes doctor for health checks across all configured providers and tools
hermes update with auto-restart for gateway service
Show update-available notice in CLI banner

Filesystem & Safety

Filesystem checkpoints and /rollback command (#824, #452)
Structured tool result hints for patch and search_files (#722)
High-value tool result CTAs — next-action guidance

🔧 Tool System

Browser

Local browser backend — zero-cost headless Chromium via agent-browser (no Browserbase needed)
Console/errors tool, annotated screenshots, auto-recording (#745)
Browser screenshot sharing via MEDIA: on all messaging platforms (#657)

Terminal & Execution

execute_code sandbox with json_parse, shell_quote, retry helpers
Docker backend improvements: custom volume mounts (#158) — @Indelwin
Daytona cloud sandbox backend (#451) — @rovle, with CLI setup, doctor, and status display
SSH backend fixes (#59) — @deankerr
Shell noise filtering and login shell execution for environment consistency
Head+tail truncation for execute_code stdout overflow
Background process management with configurable notification modes

Delegation

Subagent tool call and thinking exposure to users
Additional parameters for child agent configuration
Shared iteration budget across parent + subagents

File Operations

Fuzzy-matching patch with 9 strategies
File search via ripgrep backend
Atomic writes across all file operations

🧩 Skills Ecosystem

System

Skill slash commands — dynamic CLI and gateway integration
Optional skills — official skills shipped but not activated by default
Conditional skill activation based on tool availability (#785) — @teyrebaz33
Platform-conditional skill loading
Skill prerequisites — hide skills with unmet dependencies (#659) — @kshitijk4poor
hermes skills browse — paginated browsing of all hub skills
Skills sub-category organization
Atomic skill file writes (#551) — @aydnOktay
Skills sync data loss prevention (#563) — @0xbyt4

Bundled Skills (selected highlights)

MLOps: Axolotl, vLLM, TRL, Unsloth, PyTorch FSDP/Lightning, GGUF, PEFT, Flash Attention, Weights & Biases, Modal, Lambda Labs, and 25+ more
Research: arXiv search, agentic research ideas, ML paper writing
Creative: ASCII art (pyfiglet + cowsay + 571 fonts), ASCII video production, Excalidraw diagrams
Software Development: Systematic debugging, TDD, subagent-driven development, writing plans, code review
Productivity: Google Workspace, Notion, PowerPoint, Obsidian, nano-PDF
Gaming: Minecraft modpack server, Pokémon player
Smart Home: OpenHue (Philips Hue control)
Domain: Passive reconnaissance (subdomains, SSL, WHOIS, DNS)
Media: YouTube transcripts, GIF search, text-to-speech
Market Data: Polymarket prediction markets
OCR: PDF and scanned document extraction
Blockchain: Solana skill with USD pricing (#212) — @gizdusum
Email: AgentMail for agent-owned inboxes (#330) — @teyrebaz33
Feeds: BlogWatcher for RSS/Atom monitoring
DuckDuckGo Search: Firecrawl fallback (#267) — @gamedevCloudy; expanded with DDGS Python API (#598) — @areu01or00
OpenClaw Migration: Official migration skill (#570) — @unmodeled-tyler
ASCII Video: Full production pipeline (#854) — @SHL0MS

🔒 Security & Reliability

Security Hardening

Path traversal fix in skill_view — prevented reading arbitrary files including API keys (#220) — @Farukest
Shell injection prevention in sudo password piping (#65) — @leonsgithub
Dangerous command detection: multiline bypass fix (#233), tee/process substitution patterns (#280) — @Farukest, @dogiladeveloper
Symlink boundary check fix in skills_guard (#386) — @Farukest
Multi-word prompt injection bypass prevention in skills_guard (#192) — @0xbyt4
Symlink bypass fix in write deny list on macOS (#61) — @0xbyt4
Enforce 0600/0700 file permissions on sensitive files (#757)
.env file permissions restricted to owner-only (#529) — @Himess
Expand secret redaction patterns + config toggle to disable
FTS5 query sanitization (#565) — @0xbyt4
--force flag properly blocked from overriding dangerous verdicts (#388) — @Farukest

Reliability & Stability

Atomic writes for: sessions.json (#611) — @alireza78a; cron jobs (#146) — @alireza78a; .env config (#954); process checkpoints (#298) — @aydnOktay; batch runner (#297) — @aydnOktay; skill files (#551) — @aydnOktay
Guard all print() against OSError for systemd/headless environments (#963)
Detect, warn, and block file re-read/search loops after context compression (#705) — @0xbyt4
Reset all retry counters at start of run_conversation (#607) — @0xbyt4
Return deny on approval callback timeout instead of None (#603) — @0xbyt4
Fix None message content crashes across codebase (#277)
Fix context overrun crash with local LLM backends (#403) — @ch3ronsa
Fix _flush_sentinel leaking to external API providers (#227) — @Farukest
Prevent conversation_history mutation in callers (#229) — @Farukest
Fix systemd restart loop (#614) — @voidborne-d
Close file handles and sockets properly to prevent fd leaks (#568, #296, #709) — @alireza78a, @memosr

Windows Compatibility

Guard POSIX-only process functions for Windows (#219) — @Farukest
Windows native support via Git Bash, ZIP-based update fallback
Install to %LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes on Windows
pywinpty for PTY support on Windows (#457) — @shitcoinsherpa
Explicit UTF-8 encoding on all config/data file I/O (#458) — @shitcoinsherpa
Windows-compatible path handling in skill listing (#354, #390) — @Farukest
Regex-based search output parsing for Windows drive-letter paths (#533) — @Himess
Auth store file lock for Windows (#455) — @shitcoinsherpa

🧪 Testing

3,289 tests across agent, gateway, tools, cron, and CLI
Parallelized test suite with pytest-xdist (#802) — @OutThisLife
Comprehensive unit test batches covering core modules (#34, #60, #62, #67, #191, #193) — @0xbyt4
Telegram format tests (43 tests for italic/bold/code rendering) (#204) — @0xbyt4
Clarify tool tests (#121) — @Bartok9
Vision tools type hints and 42 tests (#792)
Context compressor boundary regression tests (#648) — @intertwine
RL environment tests — vLLM integration, Atropos tool calling — @dmahan93

🔬 RL & Evaluation Environments

Atropos Integration — Full agentic RL training pipeline with tool calling support (#17)
TerminalBench2 — Terminal-based tool calling evaluation
WebResearchEnv — Multi-step web research RL environment (#434) — @jackx707
YC-Bench — Long-horizon agent benchmark environment
OpenThoughts-TBLite — Evaluation environment and scripts
Modal sandbox — Cloud evaluation with concurrency limits (#621) — @voteblake
Local vLLM instance support for evaluation — @dmahan93
Hermes-atropos-environments bundled skill (#815)

📚 Documentation

Full documentation website (Docusaurus) with 37+ pages covering setup, configuration, tools, skills, messaging platforms, and guides
Comprehensive platform setup guides for Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and Email
AGENTS.md — development guide for AI coding assistants
CONTRIBUTING.md — contributor guidelines (#117) — @Bartok9
Slash commands reference (#142) — @Bartok9
Skin/theme system documentation
MCP documentation and examples
Auxiliary models documentation
Comprehensive accuracy audit (35+ corrections)
Documentation typo fixes (#825, #439) — @JackTheGit
Terminology and CLI formatting standardization (#166, #167, #168) — @Jr-kenny

🐛 Notable Bug Fixes

Fix DeepSeek V3 tool call parser silently dropping multi-line JSON arguments (#444) — @PercyDikec
Fix gateway transcript losing 1 message per turn due to offset mismatch (#395) — @PercyDikec
Fix /retry command silently discarding the agent's final response (#441) — @PercyDikec
Fix max-iterations retry returning empty string after think-block stripping (#438) — @PercyDikec
Fix Codex status dict key mismatch (#448) and visibility filter (#446) — @PercyDikec
Fix _strip_think_blocks regex stripping visible content when model discusses <think> tags literally (#786)
Strip <think> blocks from final user-facing responses (#174) — @Bartok9
Fix Mistral 422 errors from leftover finish_reason in assistant messages (#253) — @Sertug17
Fix OPENROUTER_API_KEY resolution order across all code paths (#295) — @0xbyt4
Fix gateway session_search crash from missing session_db (#108) — @Bartok9
Fix /retry, /undo having no effect and /reset silently losing memories in gateway (#217) — @Farukest
Fix empty file content in ReadResult.to_dict() (#225) — @Farukest
Fix retry exhaustion IndexError fallthrough (#223) — @Farukest
Fix Anthropic native base URL detection failing fast (#173) — @adavyas
Fix ClawHub Skills Hub adapter for API endpoint changes (#286) — @BP602
Fix terminal blinking on SSH due to UI invalidate throttling (#284) — @ygd58
Fix multi-line input paste detection destroying input (#84) — @0xbyt4
Fix cron job timezone handling for naive timestamps (#309) — @areu01or00
Fix memory tool entry parsing when content contains section sign (#162) — @aydnOktay
Fix Docker backend on macOS and subagent auth for Nous Portal (#46) — @rsavitt
Fix piped install silently aborting when interactive prompts fail (#72) — @cutepawss
Fix false positives in recursive delete detection (#68) — @cutepawss
Eliminate shell noise from terminal output + fix 36 test failures (#293) — @0xbyt4
Fix Honcho auto-enable when API key is present (#243) — @Bartok9
Fix duplicate 'skills' subparser crash on Python 3.11+ (#898)
Fix Telegram italic regex newline bug (#204) — @0xbyt4
Fix Ruff lint warnings across codebase (#608) — @JackTheGit

👥 Contributors

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Hermes Agent! This project is built by a growing community of developers, researchers, and AI enthusiasts.

Core Team

@teknium1 — Project creator, lead developer (~1,100 commits)
@dmahan93 — RL environments, Atropos integration, evaluation infrastructure

Top Community Contributors

@0xbyt4 — 35 PRs: MCP client, Home Assistant, security fixes, extensive test coverage, ascii-art skill, and dozens of bug fixes across the codebase
@Farukest — 15 PRs: Security hardening (path traversal, shell injection, symlink bypass), Windows compatibility, WhatsApp fixes
@aydnOktay — 8 PRs: Atomic writes, error handling improvements across Telegram, Discord, transcription, code execution, and skills
@teyrebaz33 — 4 PRs: Skills enable/disable system, quick commands, personality customization, conditional skill activation, embedding infrastructure
@Bartok9 — 8 PRs: CONTRIBUTING.md, slash commands reference, Discord channel topics, think-block stripping, TTS fix, session count fix, Honcho fix, clarify tool tests
@PercyDikec — 7 PRs: DeepSeek V3 parser fix, /retry fix, gateway transcript fix, Codex fixes, max-iterations retry fixes
@rovle — Daytona cloud sandbox backend (4 PRs)
@alireza78a — Atomic writes for cron/sessions, fd leak prevention, security allowlist fix
@satelerd — WhatsApp native media, multi-user session isolation, tool progress consolidation
@Erosika — Honcho AI-native memory integration
@SHL0MS — ASCII video skill
@shitcoinsherpa — Windows support (pywinpty, UTF-8 encoding, auth store lock)

All Contributors

@0xbyt4, @Aum08Desai, @BP602, @Bartok9, @Farukest, @FurkanL0, @Himess, @Indelwin, @JackTheGit, @JoshuaMart, @Jr-kenny, @OutThisLife, @PercyDikec, @SHL0MS, @Sertug17, @VencentSoliman, @VolodymyrBg, @adavyas, @alireza78a, @areu01or00, @aydnOktay, @batuhankocyigit, @bierlingm, @caentzminger, @cesareth, @ch3ronsa, @christomitov, @cutepawss, @deankerr, @dmahan93, @dogiladeveloper, @dragonkhoi, @erosika, @gamedevCloudy, @gizdusum, @grp06, @hjc-puro, @insecurejezza, @intertwine, @jackx707, @jdblackstar, @johnh4098, @kaos35, @kshitijk4poor, @leonsgithub, @luisv-1, @manuelschipper, @mehmetkr-31, @memosr, @mormio, @rsavitt, @rewbs, @rovle, @satelerd, @spanishflu-est1918, @stablegenius49, @tars90percent, @tekelala, @teknium1, @teyrebaz33, @tripledoublev, @unmodeled-tyler, @voidborne-d, @voteblake, @ygd58

📦 Installation

curl -fsSL https://hermes.nousresearch.com/install | bash

Or clone and install manually:

git clone https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent.git ~/.hermes/hermes-agent
cd ~/.hermes/hermes-agent
./install.sh
hermes setup

Full Changelog: v2026.3.12

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