Hidden Features in Hermes You Should Know About

Overview

This started as a Twitter post asking folks to share hidden Hermes Agent features they expect most other people don't know about — with a commitment to publish every single one into an article. So here it is: the lesser-known commands, behaviors, and tricks that most Hermes users never stumble onto, but reach for often once they find them.

It's a living collection, compiled from the community. More will land as we get them. Want to add yours? Reply on the original thread.

1. /handoff — move a live conversation between platforms

From a CLI session, run /handoff telegram (or discord, slack, …) to transfer the live conversation to that platform's home channel — same session id, full transcript, tool calls, and all.

Start something at your desk in the terminal, then walk away and keep going on your phone. The session doesn't fork or restart; it's literally the same thread continuing on a new surface. Resume back to the CLI later with /resume <title>.

Run /sethome once from the destination chat to configure it. Telegram opens a fresh forum topic; Discord opens an auto-archive thread.

🔗 Cross-platform handoff docs

2. hermes -c — continue your last session

hermes -c (or --continue) reopens the most recent CLI session with its full history. Add a name to resume the most recent session in a lineage: hermes -c "my project".

After an inopportune crash, a closed terminal, or just stepping away from a long-ranging brainstorm or research thread, you pick up exactly where you left off — context intact. A compact recap panel shows the last exchanges before the prompt returns.

🔗 CLI session resume docs

3. What context compression keeps, and what it drops

That little clamp in the status bar is the compression count: how many times Hermes has auto-summarized the session to stay under the context limit. It kicks in around 50% full by default.

When compression fires, it keeps your first 3 turns and your last ~20, and summarizes everything in between. A detail from the middle of a long session can then drop out — and the agent may repeat work it already did, even though the opening goal and the recent turns are intact.

Three levers when it bites, all in config.yaml, hot-reloading on a running gateway:

• protect_last_n — keep more recent turns uncompressed
• auxiliary.compression.model — point the summarizer at a cheap, fast model so it doesn't burn main-model tokens
• model.context_length — raise the ceiling so compression fires later

🔗 Context compression and caching docs

4. /browser connect — drive your own browser

Instead of a cloud browser, attach Hermes's browser tools to your own running Chrome, Brave, Chromium, or Edge via the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP).

Watch what the agent does in real time, use pages that need your own logged-in cookies and sessions, and skip cloud-browser costs. If nothing is already listening, /browser connect auto-launches a supported browser with remote debugging on port 9222.

/browser connect      — auto-launch/attach at 127.0.0.1:9222
/browser status       — check the connection
/browser disconnect   — detach

It's an interactive-CLI slash command — run it from the terminal (hermes / hermes chat), not from a WebUI, Telegram, or Discord chat.

🔗 Local browser via CDP docs

5. Hermes has its own REST API

The web dashboard (hermes dashboard) exposes a REST API that the frontend consumes — and you can call those endpoints directly for automation.

Pull session history, run full-text search across every message, read and update config.yaml, manage environment variables — all over plain HTTP. Management endpoints accept an optional ?profile=<name> to scope reads and writes to a specific profile.

GET /api/status                  — version, gateway, active sessions
GET /api/sessions                — 20 most recent + metadata
GET /api/sessions/search?q=...    — full-text message search
GET /api/config · PUT /api/config — read / write config
GET/PUT/DELETE /api/env           — manage env vars

🔗 Web dashboard REST API docs

6. The native cross-platform desktop app

New enough that plenty of people miss it: hermes desktop launches a native app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, built around the same agent as the CLI and gateway — sharing config, keys, sessions, skills, and memory.

It's not a separate product or a lightweight clone. Anything you set up in the terminal is already there, and anything you do in the app shows up in the terminal. You get streaming chat with live tool activity, drag-and-drop file attach, a right-hand preview rail, a command palette (Cmd/Ctrl+K), voice, and a full settings UI — no YAML editing.

🔗 Desktop app docs

7. /steer — redirect mid-task without interrupting

Set display.busy_input_mode: "steer" (or just /busy steer in the CLI). Now when you press Enter while the agent is working, your message is injected into the current run after the next tool call — no interrupt, no new turn.

Use it to drop a course-correction like "actually, also check the tests" while it's still editing code, without canceling in-flight work. Compare with queue (silently send as the next turn) and the default interrupt (stop and process immediately).

/steer      — inject after the next tool call
/queue      — send as the next turn
/interrupt  — default: stop and handle now

🔗 CLI busy input mode docs

8. /claude-code — put Claude Code in the fleet

The bundled claude-code skill lets Hermes delegate coding tasks to Anthropic's Claude Code CLI through the terminal — including running whole skill workflows.

Because Anthropic left print mode (-p) available, Hermes can hand Claude a one-shot task and get the result back. If you already have Claude set up, adding it to the fleet is basically free — and a real boon for autonomous coding.

🔗 Claude Code skill docs

Keep them coming

This is a living wiki, not a finished list. The features above are the ones the community surfaced first — the commands people wished they'd known about sooner. As more come in, they'll be added.

You can browse a living wiki version of this collection at get-hermes.ai/hidden-features.

Flow contributed by hermes_updates. For the official reference, see the Hermes Agent documentation.