Wondering how to set up a Hermes group chat? The quick version is just below — and honestly, this is the update that finally makes Hermes Agent feel like a team rather than a tool. Bot Mode landed in v0.21.0 (released 31 August 2026, per the official release notes on GitHub), and group chats are its headline feature.
Short answer — Hermes group chat in 30 seconds:
- Group chats arrived in Hermes Agent v0.21.0 (31 August 2026) as part of Bot Mode, which is bundled and on by default in the desktop app.
- Your agents become named bots with deterministic avatar faces in a shared roster — you create rooms where bots talk to each other and to you.
- @-mention any bot from the composer to direct work at it, and rename rooms or set room pictures like any chat app.
- hermes peer adds bot-to-bot DMs between agents across profiles.
- The sidebar now splits into SESSIONS | BOTS tabs, with per-bot hide/unhide controls.
What Bot Mode’s group rooms actually are
Until this release, running several Hermes agents at once was plumbing: separate sessions, separate contexts, you playing message-carrier between them. The v0.21.0 release notes describe the change perfectly — multi-agent work goes from “plumbing” to “a chat app full of coworkers”.
Concretely, Bot Mode gives every agent a name, a deterministic avatar face, and a place in a shared roster. A Hermes group chat is a room you create with any mix of those bots. Inside it, bots respond to you and to each other, so you can watch a researcher bot hand findings to a writer bot while you steer from the same thread. If you’ve seen my breakdown of the Hermes Agent Office, this is the conversational layer that sits on top of the same idea: your agents as visible team members, not background processes.
Because it’s a bundled, default-on part of the desktop app, there’s nothing to install beyond the update itself. If you’re brand new to Hermes, my one-click install guide gets you to the desktop app in a few minutes.
How to set up a Hermes group chat in Bot Mode
Here’s the flow I use, based on what shipped in v0.21.0:
- Update to v0.21.0 or later. Bot Mode ships with the desktop app by default — no flags, no plugin hunting.
- Open the BOTS tab. The sidebar is now tabbed SESSIONS | BOTS. Your named agents live in the roster, and you can hide or unhide individual bots to keep it tidy.
- Create a group chat and add bots. Pick the agents you want in the room. Give the room its own name and picture so your SEO crew doesn’t blur into your ops crew.
- @-mention to direct traffic. Mention a specific bot from the composer when you want that agent to take a task; leave it unaddressed when you want the room to work it out.
- Wire in DMs where a room is overkill. The hermes peer command sets up bot-to-bot direct messages between agents across profiles — handy when two bots need a standing line to each other without a whole room.
🔥 Want this set up without the guesswork? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom we’re already running Hermes group chats as full content teams — 3,700+ members, four live calls per week, daily tutorials, done-for-you templates and a 30-day roadmap, including the exact bot-team setups I use. And if you’d rather have me look at your specific SEO pipeline first, book a free SEO strategy session and we’ll map your agent team one-on-one.
Hermes group chat features that actually matter
Beyond the headline room-with-bots, three v0.21.0 additions make group chats genuinely useful rather than a novelty:
Cron jobs with memory. Scheduled jobs now keep persistent memory like regular agents. With continuity switched on, each run’s output carries into the next run, so a monitoring job can deduplicate against what it already reported. Jobs get durable notepads, skip LLM processing when nothing changed, and their output can land in the bot’s canonical Bot Chat — where the bot responds. That means your rank-tracking bot posts into the room and the team reacts, without you touching anything. It builds on the memory system I covered in Hermes Memory OS.
Live subagent steering. The delegate_task function gained real-time orchestration: list running children, steer one mid-flight with course corrections, or stop it early while keeping partial results. You can validate child outputs against a JSON schema, per-delegation costs surface in results, and defaults went up to 250 iterations with 10 concurrent children. In a group chat context, that’s what stops a runaway bot burning tokens while the rest of the team waits.
The agent drives the desktop browser. Hermes now navigates, clicks and reads the in-app browser directly, and you can pop pages out to your system browser. Your research bot in the room can actually go and look at the page you’re arguing about.
Here’s how the experience compares to running Hermes before Bot Mode:
| Workflow | Before v0.21.0 | With Hermes group chat |
|---|---|---|
| Running multiple agents | Separate sessions, manual copy-paste between them | One room, bots talk to each other and to you |
| Directing a task | Switch session, paste context | @-mention the bot from the composer |
| Scheduled jobs | Stateless runs, repeated findings | Continuity carries output run-to-run; posts into Bot Chat |
| Supervising subagents | Wait for the run to finish | Steer mid-flight, stop early, keep partial results |
| Organising agents | Session list | SESSIONS | BOTS tabs, per-bot hide/unhide, named rooms |
How I’d use this for SEO teams
The obvious play is a content room: a keyword-research bot, a drafting bot and a QA bot in one Hermes group chat, with a cron job posting fresh SERP movements into the room every morning. Because cron output lands in the bot’s chat and continuity deduplicates against earlier runs, you get a standing daily briefing instead of a pile of repeated alerts. Compare that with juggling the messaging integrations I ranked in my best messaging app for Hermes Agent guide — rooms with @-mentions are simply a better control surface for multi-agent work.
If you want the full changelog context for what else shipped alongside Bot Mode — the MCP 2.x SDK migration, the command centre upgrades, hermes:// deep links — I covered the previous release cycle in my Hermes Agent v0.20.6 breakdown, and the jump from there to v0.21.0 is the biggest I’ve seen in the project. This is the kind of system we build out step-by-step inside the AI Profit Boardroom, and it’s exactly the sort of workflow I’ll happily sketch with you on a free SEO strategy session.
The bottom line on hermes group chat
Hermes group chat is the moment multi-agent stops being a demo and starts being a team you manage in a chat window. Everything above comes straight from the v0.21.0 release notes published on GitHub on 31 August 2026 — bundled Bot Mode, named bots with avatar faces, group rooms with @-mentions, hermes peer DMs, cron continuity, live subagent steering and desktop browser control. It’s on by default, so the only real question is what team you build first. My advice: start with one room, two bots and one cron job, and grow it once the room proves itself.
FAQ: hermes group chat
Is Hermes group chat available now?
Yes. Group chats shipped as part of Bot Mode in Hermes Agent v0.21.0, published on GitHub on 31 August 2026. Bot Mode is bundled and on by default in the desktop app, so once you update you can create a group chat straight away.
Do I need a plugin to use Hermes group chat?
No. According to the v0.21.0 release notes, Bot Mode ships as a bundled, default-on part of the desktop app, so group chats, the bot roster and @-mentions all work out of the box after updating.
How do I talk to one specific bot in a Hermes group chat?
Use @-mentions. You can @-mention any bot from the composer inside a group chat, which is how you direct a question or task at one agent while the rest of the team follows the thread.
What is the hermes peer command for?
The v0.21.0 release notes describe hermes peer as the way to set up bot-to-bot DMs between agents across profiles — direct messages between two bots rather than a full group room.
Can scheduled Hermes jobs post into a group or bot chat?
Yes. v0.21.0 gave cron jobs persistent memory, and with continuity enabled each run’s output carries into the next. Job output can land in the bot’s canonical Bot Chat, where the bot responds like any other conversation.
How is a Hermes group chat different from a normal session?
A session is you working with one agent. A group chat is a shared room: multiple named bots with their own avatar faces sit in one thread, talk to each other and to you, and the sidebar splits into SESSIONS and BOTS tabs with per-bot hide and unhide controls.
Related reading
- Hermes Agent Office: Your Bots Get a 3D HQ
- Hermes Memory OS: One Brain for Every Agent
- Hermes Agent v0.20.6: All the New Features
Ready to turn your Hermes group chat into a revenue machine? Join 3,700+ members inside the AI Profit Boardroom for four live calls a week, daily tutorials, done-for-you templates and the 30-day roadmap — or book a free SEO strategy session and I’ll personally map out how an AI agent team fits your business.
About the author
I’m Julian Goldie — SEO agency owner, 394K+ YouTube subscribers, 100% Upwork job-success score, 75K+ community members across my groups, 10+ years in SEO, and author of a best-selling SEO book. I’ve been building AI agent teams for SEO since the earliest Hermes releases, and Bot Mode group chats are now the backbone of how my own content pipelines run.
Watch my daily AI videos on YouTube, learn AI SEO with 3,700+ members inside the AI Profit Boardroom, or book a free SEO strategy session and I’ll map it out with you one-on-one.
Last updated September 2026. This is the living guide to hermes group chat — it gets updated as the tools change.
