Nous Research Ships Bot Mode: Hermes Agent Becomes a Multi-Bot Workspace With Named Bot Teammates
If you have wanted one agent workspace where several assistants can join the same conversation, Nous Research just moved that idea forward. The lab behind the Hermes model family has released Bot Mode for Hermes Agent, turning the open-source autonomous agent into a multi-bot workspace. You can run a roster of named bot teammates, each with its own identity and context, beside the main agent.
Bot Mode is hermes-bots, a bundled plugin introduced in Hermes Agent v0.20.2, released August 16, 2026. It adds a tabbed SESSIONS|BOTS sidebar to the interface, with per-bot hide and unhide controls. Each bot operates as a named profile that can participate in group chats alongside the main agent.
The feature is built around a core teammate protocol. You can spin up multiple bots, give each its own identity and context, and manage them from a single sidebar. Because hermes-bots ships bundled with the main application, setup is part of the standard release rather than a separate add-on.
August Patch Fixes, Release Context, Practical Value
On August 18, 2026, patch v0.20.4 delivered Bot Mode group-chat fixes for long-running member turns, Markdown rendering, and cross-machine routing. That means bot teammates now handle extended conversations correctly, display formatted text properly, and can be routed across different machines in a distributed setup.
The release window introducing Bot Mode included the MCP 2.x SDK migration with 2026-07-28 stateless protocol support. It brought a CommandCode provider plugin for executing commands, and Cua Driver 0.20 runtime contracts for computer-use tasks.
Hermes Agent is an open-source autonomous agent built by Nous Research. It runs on local machines, Docker, SSH, or serverless backends like Modal and Daytona, and connects to over 20 messaging platforms, including Telegram, Discord, Slack, and WhatsApp.
For you, the practical point is simple: one Hermes Agent can now host many recognizable coworkers. You can hide a noisy bot, unhide it later, keep group chats readable, and distribute teammates across machines without losing the thread. Bot Mode makes agent teams feel far less like scripts and much more like staff, a clearer path to coordinated automation at work today.