Hermes Agent Update v0.15 is POWERFUL! (Velocity Release)

Core refactor shrinks the main loop

run_agent.py dropped from 16,000 lines to 3,800 lines in roughly 8 days, redistributed across 14 focused modules. User-facing behavior stays compatible, so future updates are less likely to break your agent the way OpenClaw's used to.

Startup and overhead improvements

hermes --version went from 700ms to 258ms. Per-turn framework overhead fell from 399,000 function calls to 213,000 — a cut you can actually feel mid-conversation, with fewer hangs on simple tasks and less need for /goal.

Session search is no longer painful

Search time dropped from ~90 seconds to 20ms — about 4,500× faster — by removing the auxiliary LLM that previously powered it. Bonus: hermes sessions list now lets you resume a previous session and see the verbatim conversation instead of digging through noisy logs full of tool calls, reasoning, and hex strings.

Kanban swarm turns Hermes into a coding harness

New hermes kanban swarm command builds a graph with a root task, parallel workers, a verifier, and a synthesizer. It ships with work-tree-per-task (so coding jobs don't collide in one directory), TTL claims, retry fingerprinting, and stale-task respawn guards. The creator flags this as the update's standout feature and is doing a dedicated video on it.

Security hardening against "brainworm" prompt worms

The release blocks the recent brainworm-class prompt injection at three choke points: tool output, recalled memory, and stored skills, plus 15 new threat patterns and a security guidance plugin.

Same-day hot fix

Hours after v0.15 shipped, a patch restored the 19,000-entry skills catalog, fixed the LoopBack/Docker dashboard reload loop, corrected kanban worker behavior, and re-enabled MCP bear command resolution in Docker.

Integrations worth noting

Notify is now the 23rd messaging platform (skip it — stick to TUI/CLI per the creator), Krea for image gen (requires a separate Krea API key, not bundled with the news portal sub), and Bitwarden for one-token secret bootstrapping across provider keys.