Nous Research Ships Hermes Agent v0.23.0 “The Hearth”: Browser Webapp Desktop, Unified Gateway Sessions, Plugin Catalog Past 1,050

Core Background & Industry Pain Points

Local agents often split across CLI, desktop, messaging bots and cron, so the same chat can double-write or lose history. On 2026-11-05 Nous Research shipped Hermes Agent v0.23.0 (The Hearth), unifying surfaces around one gateway “hearth” and adding a browser desktop plus a much larger plugin ecosystem.

Architecture Highlights & Internals

Session authority moves to a per-machine gateway: CLI, TUI, Desktop, ACP editors, bots and cron attach as clients sharing one queue and history. The new Webapp serves the full Desktop from that gateway (off by default via webapp.enabled / Web Access). Desktop keeps multiple gateways connected; Group Chats gain auto-routing and cross-machine bots. CLI/TUI add inline terminal images and /rewind (Esc Esc). Delegation becomes a pluggable backend.

Authoritative Benchmarks & Measured Scores

No independent agent benchmark scores shipped with the release; the notes emphasize engineering and ecosystem metrics. Vendor GitHub release: since v0.22.0 about 10,080 commits, ~1,950 merged PRs, ~850 closed issues and 666 contributors; plugin catalog ~600 to 1,050+. Latency/memory work includes shared prompt cache for recurring cron, ~1,570 fewer prompt tokens on one-shot calls, and long-lived gateway memory release (vendor example: ~35k-cron sidebar refresh from ~121s to instant). Do not invent agent scores.

Developer Hands-on Guide

Upgrade with hermes update or Docker tag nousresearch/hermes-agent:stable. Enable Webapp: hermes config set webapp.enabled true, restart the gateway, then hermes webapp. Breaking changes: legacy browser_* tools removed in favor of browser_exec; Desktop needs macOS 13+ / 64-bit Windows (Electron 44); hermes mcp serve moved to plugin command hermes mcp-serve. See the v0.23.0 GitHub release and hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs.