Hermes Agent 0.23.0 "The Hearth Release": One Gateway, Every Surface

Nous Research shipped Hermes Agent v0.23.0, "The Hearth Release," on November 5, 2026. The name sets the theme: a hearth is the fire at the center of a household, the place everyone gathers. This release is about gathering a scattered agent back into one place.

The window since v0.22.0 was large by any standard: roughly 10,080 commits, about 1,950 merged pull requests, and 850 issues closed, across 8,720 changed files — 725,200 insertions against 201,400 deletions. The contributor list, 666 names, says something about how the project is run as much as the feature list does. The patch release v0.22.7 (November 3) was folded into this window, so an upgrade covers two releases' worth of fixes.

The headline feature is the one everyone sees first: the whole Desktop workspace now opens in a browser tab, served by your own gateway. For self-hosters that is the point — the interface comes from the machine you already control, not from someone else's cloud. You get a web UI without the hosted part, and any device with a browser can reach the same workspace. The gateway is the fixed point; the browser tab is simply another window onto the same sessions.

The deeper change is underneath the UI. A single gateway now owns each session. CLI, TUI, Desktop, editors, bots, and cron all sit at the same table and share one agent, instead of every surface running its own. Anyone who has juggled the old arrangement — per-surface agents, each with its own wiring — will recognize what this removes. That is the difference between a fleet of half-connected agents and one agent with many doorways. Tool configuration and session state no longer drift apart as you switch surfaces.

The rest of the release fills out that story:

• Desktop keeps every machine you run Hermes on connected at once, so the workspace follows you instead of living on one box.
• Group Chats route their own conversations, which keeps multi-participant threads from tangling with your personal sessions.
• The terminal now draws images inline and lets you rewind a conversation — small quality-of-life wins for people who live in the REPL.
• Plugins can keep themselves updated, removing a maintenance chore that used to pile up between releases.
• Paid MCP tools get price tags and spend limits, so an expensive call is visible before it happens.
• Delegation backends are now pluggable: route subagents by model map or by profile, instead of a fixed default.
• The plugin catalog grew from about 600 entries to more than 1,050, alongside a leaner built-in skill set — more to install, less to haul along by default.

For anyone running Hermes Agent for real work, two things are worth noting. First, the gateway unification changes how multi-surface setups behave; if you run the TUI and the Desktop side by side, you will feel the difference immediately. Second, the contributor count and the catalog growth are signs of a project that keeps widening, even as the built-in kit gets leaner.

Hearth is a fitting name for a release that pulls everything back to one place: one gateway, one agent, many doorways — with the whole desktop visible from any browser you happen to have open.

The release notes and assets are on GitHub: Hermes Agent v0.23.0