@HermesWatcher: Hermes had another ridiculous week. Last week was huge. Somehow, it did not slow down. In the last seven days, Hermes l…

Hermes had another ridiculous week. Last week was huge. Somehow, it did not slow down. In the last seven days, Hermes learned to control the browser you are actually looking at, Bot Mode turned into a multi-machine agent fleet, conversations gained live interactive UI, Cron got persistent memory, and `/review` gave finished work an independent second set of eyes. And those are just the headliners. Here are the biggest Hermes changes from August 17-23: ▸ Hermes can now use the browser you are actually looking at: The in-app Preview browser is no longer something Hermes can only open and read. Hermes can inspect the page, click, type, scroll, press keys, navigate, reload, and even annotate an element so you can see exactly what it is targeting. That means Hermes can work inside the visible browser session you are already signed into while you watch it happen. This opens up a ridiculous number of workflows. ▸ Bot Mode became a real multi-machine agent fleet: A lot of what was coming together last week became real infrastructure this week. Desktop can now give you one Bot Mode roster across registered Hermes gateways while keeping every bot tied to the machine that actually owns it. Local. Remote. SSH. Hermes Cloud. Different machines. Remote bots can open their real Bot Chat without moving your normal Sessions workspace. Bots also gained `message_agent`, giving them an actual agent-native way to message teammates instead of constructing shell commands. And bots across different Desktop connections can message each other too. Group rooms also gained real threads plus images, PDFs, files, paste, and drag-and-drop attachments. Bot Mode is starting to look a lot less like “multiple profiles” and a lot more like an actual team. ▸ Your Hermes conversation can now become an interface: Plugins can render live UI directly inside the conversation. Not a screenshot. Not a link to another app. Actual interactive UI inside the transcript. And it does not have to be one-way. Interacting with that UI can send a real turn back to Hermes behind the scenes, let the agent do more work, and update what you see. Chat does not have to end in text anymore. ▸ `/review` gives your agent an independent second set of eyes: Your main agent finishes the work. Run `/review` and Hermes launches a separate background reviewer with its own tools to inspect the actual work behind the conversation. Code. PRs. Docs. Research. Other referenced artifacts. The reviewer can work under the repo’s own project instructions and can be told which skills the primary agent was using. You can also give Review its own model. One model does the work. Another independently checks it. The findings return to the original session so the main agent can respond, defend the work, or fix what it missed. This is a big one. ▸ Cron became much more than “run this prompt at 8 AM”: Cron agents can now use Hermes persistent memory, including MEMORY.md and USER.md. Individual jobs can also pin their own reasoning effort, so a lightweight recurring check does not need the same reasoning budget as a scheduled deep analysis. And scheduled output can now be delivered directly into a bot’s canonical Bot Chat as a real incoming turn. The bot reads it and responds. Now start combining scheduling, memory, Bot Mode, and unattended work. That gets interesting very quickly. ▸ `hermes update` now checks whether the update actually worked: This one is less flashy, but it matters. Hermes has been rebuilding the updater around the reality that one installation may have multiple profiles, gateways, services, and runtimes running at once. `hermes update --plan` can inventory that fleet before touching anything. Updates generate structured receipts. Running gateways can report which code they are actually serving. And the restart phase now has to account for the runtimes that were in the plan. If Hermes expected something to be updated and it was missed, stale, or down, the updater can fail visibly instead of quietly declaring victory. That is the kind of boring infrastructure improvement you really appreciate the first time something goes wrong. ▸ Long-running jobs got a serious reliability pass: The old default 500-turn ceiling is gone. Hermes now runs with unlimited turns by default unless you choose to set a cap. New stall guards also look for agents repeatedly making the same tool call or announcing that they are about to continue and then stopping. And if Hermes runs the same tool again and gets the exact same giant result, it still executes the tool fresh, but it can feed the model a tiny reference to the previous result instead of dumping another 20K-50K characters into context. MCP results also got tighter context handling. The goal is pretty simple: Let long jobs keep working without letting the agent quietly spin its wheels or bury itself in repeated context. ▸ Fresh Hermes installs need fewer API keys before they can do useful work: Hermes now has keyless paths for web tooling across multiple supported providers. There is also a new `opencode-free` provider for OpenCode’s free tier that does not require an API key or OpenCode account. It appears in the normal model pickers too. Install Hermes. Pick an available free model. Give it a job. The distance between “I just installed Hermes” and “my agent is doing useful work” keeps getting shorter. ▸ Repositories can now bring their own Hermes skills: A repo can include project-specific skills under `.hermes/skills/` or `.agents/skills/`. Inside that project, those skills can take priority over lower-level versions of the same skill. Hermes also puts a trust boundary around this. The repo has to be trusted, project skills are scanned when loaded, and an unknown repo does not silently get permission to inject its own agent instructions. For teams building repeatable Hermes workflows around a codebase, this could become extremely useful. Also worth knowing: → Desktop voice can use supported STT/TTS providers directly through the active profile. → Eligible Codex GPT sessions now default to 272K context, with explicit `-900k` variants when you actually want the larger window. → `/model` got fuzzy search. → Desktop got a command palette. → `/status` got much more useful session information. → `clarify` can ask several independent questions in one batch instead of interrupting you one question at a time. → Hermes can apply Desktop layout presets itself. → Plugins can be installed from Git or `hermes://` links with a review step before anything gets installed. Last week’s story was Hermes learning to keep working, delegate work, supervise agents, and coordinate across machines. This week is what happens when those pieces start connecting. The agent can use the browser you see. Bots can work and communicate across machines. Scheduled jobs can remember, wake bots, and hand work back into the team. Agents can build interfaces inside the conversation. And when the work is finished, another agent can independently inspect it. Hermes is starting to look less like one very capable agent with a long feature list and more like an operating layer for a team of agents that can actually keep working together.