Grok Bot showed everyone what a team of AI agents looks like — named bots with their own jobs, memories and schedules. Now Hermes Bot Mode has shipped the same idea free, open source, and running on your own machine. Teknium — co-founder and lead engineer at Nous Research, the company behind Hermes — released it on 14 August 2026 as a one-day public beta: install it as a plugin today, let the community feedback flow, and then it ships built into the main Hermes desktop app for everyone. I had it running inside my Agent OS the same morning.
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And when someone in the community pointed out that it looks a lot like Grok Bot, Teknium's three-word answer said it all: "That's the point." After a day of hands-on use, I think this is the most important Hermes release in months. Here is what it does, the buried setting almost everyone will miss, and the honest rough edges.
From a Pile of Sessions to a Roster of Bots
Hermes used to be organised around sessions — a messy pile of look-alike chats. Bot Mode flips that into a roster: a left panel of named bots, each with its own avatar, personality, chat, memory and schedule. Click a bot and you land in its chat, exactly like messaging a teammate.
Creating a bot takes seconds — a name, a title, a job description — and your existing Hermes agent profiles auto-appear as bots the moment the plugin installs. Nothing gets rebuilt. I have tried plenty of front ends for Hermes — my best Hermes web UI roundup covers the lot — but every one of them still organised your work as chats. This is the first interface that organises it as staff.
The Buried Setting That Makes Hermes Bot Mode Different
This is my headline point, because it is tucked away in each bot's advanced section and it changes everything: you can pin a specific model per bot. Your research bot runs on one model, your writing bot on another, your inbox bot on a small, fast local model that costs nothing. Every bot gets a different brain, and you choose each one.
Grok Bot cannot do that. It runs xAI's models, in xAI's cloud, under xAI's rules — I have broken down that whole trade-off in my Grok Bot vs Hermes comparison. Bot Mode is MIT-licensed open source, completely free, runs on your computer, and takes any model per bot: frontier, free, or fully local. I already benchmark models against my own tasks with Goldie Bench, so per-bot pinning is those results applied bot by bot — the model that won my research tests now drives the research bot.
If you want a bot roster doing real business work, the AI Profit Boardroom made Bot Mode the roadmap the morning it dropped — which bots to create first, and which model to give each one. → Get the bot playbook
Every Bot Remembers Its Own Job
Each bot keeps separate memory. The research bot remembers its research. The content bot remembers your style. Nothing bleeds between them, and the histories build over time — after a few weeks a bot stops feeling like a chat window and starts feeling like a team member months into the role.
Bots That Message Each Other
Every bot has a persistent agent inbox, and bots can message each other with attribution — the receiver knows exactly which agent sent it. Each bot's personality file teaches it the reply protocol.
Then there are mentions, which are the bit I use most. Type an at-sign plus a bot's name in any chat — @researcher, have a look at this — and your current bot hands the task off, waits, and folds the answer back into the same conversation. One thread, two agents working. Someone in the community has already cloned their entire Grok Bot setup — a coordinator bot plus worker bots — into Bot Mode: the same team layout, rebuilt on free open-source software they fully control. If you have been hunting for a free Grok Bot alternative, that story is the proof.
Routines: Scheduled Work Without a Developer
Each bot has a routines panel for recurring scheduled tasks: summarise my inbox every morning, check my niche at noon, pull fresh content ideas every Monday. The results land in that bot's chat history, so one scroll shows you the week's work.
Under the hood these run on Hermes's existing cron scheduler — the same machinery I covered in my Hermes loop guide — so nothing new has been bolted on. And these are business-owner tasks, not developer tasks — you type a sentence into a panel, no code involved.
Why It Will Last: Profiles Underneath
Here is the architecture point that convinced me this is not a toy. A bot is a Hermes profile. Profiles already existed as fully isolated setups — own config, own memory, own skills, own credentials, own chat history, own folder on your machine (which is exactly why my Hermes backup and import process carries straight over). Bot Mode is a new interface layered on that standard surface: no core patches, no background daemons, no extra storage. Teknium confirmed it himself — it is "just a new simplified experience for profiles".
My analogy: this is a house built on the foundation, not a treehouse. Plugins that hack around the core break when the core moves. This one cannot break that way, because it only uses what Hermes already offers every profile.
📺 Watch: Grok Bot DESTROYS Hermes Agent?
Souls, Clones and Little Blinking Faces
Each bot has a soul.md personality file — how it talks, what it cares about, how it behaves — and you can write one per bot. Cloning copies everything: config, skills, personality, even memory. A research bot you spent weeks training can be duplicated onto a new project with everything it learned intact. That alone would justify the plugin for me.
The avatars deserve a mention too: little geometric faces — seven shapes, ten colours — with blinking eyes that scan while a bot works. You can upload a photo, generate an AI portrait, or add a pixel pet. It sounds silly, and it is, but with six bots and three of them mid-task you can see at a glance who is working. A status light with personality.
My Real Setup: Oracle, Astros and Apollo
My named agents — Oracle, who watches competitors; Astros, who pulls keyword and content ideas from live search data; and Apollo, my voice — used to be separate profiles I hopped between. Now each one has a face, a chat and a schedule sitting side by side, and Oracle can message Astros directly when a competitor moves on a keyword. That handoff used to be me copy-pasting between windows.
None of this required technical skill. Creating a bot is three clicks. Installing the plugin is copying one folder onto the machine that runs the desktop app. And after the beta, it ships built in.
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The Honest Limitations
Hermes Bot Mode is genuinely good, but day one was not flawless. Five things to know before you install:
- It is a beta. Not super smooth yet — that is exactly what the one-day public test is for.
- It is a desktop plugin. It must be installed on the machine running the Hermes desktop app, not on your server — early testers installed it on home servers and saw nothing. Remote gateways on a VPS are fine, though: the desktop app connects remotely, and Teknium confirmed that setup works.
- No multi-bot group chat yet. The question was asked; the answer was not yet. You get one bot per chat, plus messaging and mentions between them.
- Bot-to-bot delivery is not a live interrupt. The receiving bot sees its inbox the next time it runs, not the instant the message lands.
- Deleting a bot is deliberately not in the interface. It is command line only — a safety choice, so a misclick can never wipe a bot's memory.
The Pattern Worth Learning Once
Step back and the bigger picture is obvious: named agents with jobs, memory and schedules, talking to each other, is now the shape everywhere. Grok Bot has it. OpenMausBot has it. Paperclip has it. Now Hermes has it, free.
Which means the skill worth building is not any single tool — it is running a roster: defining jobs, writing personalities, splitting work between agents. Learn it once and it transfers to every version that ships. And because memory compounds, the people who set up their roster now will have bots with months of built-up context by the time everyone else installs the built-in release.
Bot Mode vs Grok Bot at a Glance
| Hermes Bot Mode | Grok Bot | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | xAI's platform, xAI's pricing |
| Licence | MIT open source | Proprietary |
| Where it runs | Your computer | xAI's cloud |
| Model choice | Any model, pinned per bot — frontier, free or local | xAI's models only |
| Per-bot memory | Yes — separate memory per bot, stored on your machine | Held inside xAI's platform |
| Group chat | Not yet — messaging and mentions instead | Depends on xAI's roadmap |
Hermes Bot Mode FAQ
Is Hermes Bot Mode free?
Yes — MIT-licensed open source, free: a plugin during the beta, then built into the Hermes desktop app for everyone. Your only cost is whichever models you run, and local ones cost nothing.
Does Bot Mode replace my existing Hermes profiles?
No — your profiles are the bots. Existing agent profiles auto-appear in the roster the moment the plugin installs, with their config, skills, memory and history untouched. A new view, not a migration.
Can bots talk to each other?
Yes. Every bot has a persistent inbox, messages carry attribution, and @mentions let one bot hand a task to another and fold the answer back into the same thread. Just remember delivery is not instant — the receiver picks it up next time it runs.
Does it work if my Hermes gateway is on a VPS?
Yes — the desktop app connects to the remote gateway, and Teknium confirmed that setup works. What does not work is installing the plugin on the server itself: it belongs on the machine running the desktop app.
How do I delete a bot?
From the command line only. That is deliberate — keeping deletion out of the interface means a misclick can never wipe a bot's memory.
My Verdict
Hermes Bot Mode takes the best idea in Grok Bot — a team of named agents — and rebuilds it as free, open-source software where every bot runs the model you choose, on hardware you control, with memory nobody can take away. It is a beta with real rough edges, but it sits on the profile foundation, so it will last — and the roster you build today keeps compounding. I set mine up on day one; I would do the same in your position.
If you want a bot roster running your business by the time everyone else installs it, check out the AI Profit Boardroom — inside you get the full Hermes playbook, the Agent OS, four weekly coaching calls where your bot roster gets reviewed live, daily tutorials, and 3,700+ business owners building alongside you. → Build your bot roster with us
