A team of agents in Hermes, one block at a time
Hermes Agent gives you several ways to make agents work together. That's powerful, and it's also confusing on day one. This page walks you through it: learn the key terms, pick the right pattern, choose local, cloud, or hybrid, then follow a step-by-step tutorial.
Everything here comes from Hermes's official docs, and every section links to its source. Hermes moves fast, so check the linked page if something looks different on your version.
Six terms that make the rest easy
Most confusion comes from mixing these up, especially profile and subagent. Tap a card for details.
Which kind of "multi-agent" do you actually need?
Hermes has three main ways for agents to work together, plus one that's often mistaken for multi-agent. Answer a few questions to see which one fits.
| Compared on | Subagents (delegate_task) | Kanban + profiles | A2A |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shape | A function call: fork, then join | A durable work queue with a state machine | HTTP calls between separate agents |
| Who does the work | Anonymous child, fresh context | A named profile with its own memory | Another agent (Hermes or any A2A-compliant framework) |
| Survives a restart? | No: a failed child stays failed | Yes: block → unblock → re-run; crashed workers get reclaimed | Depends on the peer |
| Human in the loop | No (children can't ask you questions) | Yes: comment or unblock at any point | Through the peer's own channels |
| Where | Same machine, same session | Same machine (designed for a single host) | Across processes, machines, and frameworks |
| Best for | Quick parallel research, reviews, refactors | Pipelines, long jobs, digital twins, fleets | Your laptop agent handing work to a server agent |
The first two columns come from the comparison table in Hermes's Kanban docs. The A2A column is from the A2A docs.
"Hybrid" is just three settings you choose separately
People talk about local vs cloud as one choice. In Hermes it's three separate questions: where the model thinks, where commands run, and where the agent itself lives. You can also give subagents a different model. Set each one and you'll get a starter config.
How a team of profiles hands work along
This simulates the auth-feature example from Hermes's Kanban tutorial. Each card is assigned to a profile. The dispatcher runs inside the gateway (every 60 seconds by default). On each pass it moves cards whose parents are done into ready, starts the assigned profile as a worker, and records the handoff. Press Next tick to step through.
Simplified: real boards also have triage, review, and archived statuses, and a worker can take many turns before it calls kanban_complete. Workers use kanban_* tools; you use hermes kanban … commands or the dashboard.
Pick a tutorial and follow it in order
Start with A if you're new. Each step has the exact command and a link to the doc it came from. Ticked steps are saved in this browser.
The mistakes new users actually make
Each of these is spelled out in Hermes's own docs. Knowing them up front saves hours.