How-To Series · 2: Daily Driver

Bot Mode

Turn your Hermes profiles into a roster of named Bots, each with one permanent chat, its own routines, group chats, and messages to each other.

After this videoYou can create a Bot from the desktop app, give it its own model, skills and routines, seat several Bots in a group chat, and let them message each other, including on a headless install.

Bot Mode is built into the Hermes desktop app and on by default, as a Bots tab next to Sessions. A Bot is a Hermes profile, so its config, memory, skills, credentials and history stay in the profile folder, hermes -p <bot> chat opens the same agent, and its routines appear in hermes cron list. Every Bot has one permanent Bot Chat where /new compacts instead of forking. New Agent needs three fields, and Advanced adds cloning, a model pin, SOUL.md and per-skill, toolset and MCP choices. Routines are cron jobs named [bot:<name>] whose runs land in the Bot's chat. Group chats seat 2 to 6 Bots for up to three rounds per message, and Bots message each other with the message_agent tool, which a headless install can enable by hand.

About these resources. Every command in this video comes from the Bot Mode doc.

New words here · Plain English

one sentence each · full glossary

Bot ModeA tab in the Hermes desktop app that shows your profiles as a roster of named Bots, each with its own chat, routines, and avatar.

Bot ChatThe one permanent conversation every Bot has. Clicking the Bot always opens it, and /new compacts it instead of starting over.

RoutineA recurring task attached to a Bot. Under the hood it is a normal Hermes cron job named [bot:], and its runs land in that Bot's chat.

message_agentThe tool a Bot uses to send a message to another Bot. It only exists inside a Bot Chat.

Sources · What this video distills

1 docs page · every command below traces to it

Primary guide

Bot Mode

Commands shown · Copy and paste

each shows the source doc it came from

Open a Bot's agent from a shellfrom source ↗

hermes -p <bot> chat

See Bot routines (named [bot:<name>])from source ↗

hermes cron list

Sign a Bot in to an OAuth providerfrom source ↗

hermes -p <name> auth add <provider>

Headless: create the canonical Bot Chatfrom source ↗

hermes -p <bot> chat -c "Bot Chat" --create-if-missing

Headless: mark the install as Bot-Mode-managed (profile.yaml)from source ↗

ui_meta: { hermes-bots: {} }

Going deeper · Related Hermes docs

further reading · not sources of facts shown above

The primitive every Bot is built on.

Where the Bots tab and Routines pane live.

Scheduled Tasks (Cron)

What a routine is under the hood.

Next in the series · Episodes that build on this

Schedule With Cron