Nous Research shipped animated pet support for Hermes Agent, giving users access to more than 3,200 sprite mascots from the open-source petdex gallery. The pets provide visual feedback by animating across six states—idle, running, thinking, waving, celebrating, and failing—that correspond to agent activity. The feature is purely cosmetic with no effect on tokens, prompt caching, or agent behavior, and works across the command-line interface, terminal user interface, and desktop application.
Nous Research Implements Six-State Animation System
The pet sprites map their animations to specific agent operations. The idle state displays when no activity occurs, the running state activates during tool execution, and review mode appears when the model processes information. A wave animation triggers when a turn ends cleanly, a jump animation celebrates completed plans, and a failed state indicates errors. Users install pets through the command hermes pets install boba --select, which places the sprite in the profile directory. The feature remains off by default until explicitly activated. Users can switch between installed pets using the command hermes pets select name.
Hermes Agent Supports Multiple Rendering Protocols
The desktop version renders the mascot on a canvas that users can pop out into a transparent, always-on-top window via shift-click. The floating window displays speech bubbles—"working…", "thinking…", "your turn"—and shows a mail icon when tasks finish while the application is minimized. In terminal environments, Hermes renders sprites at full fidelity on setups supporting graphics protocols including kitty, Ghostty, or WezTerm. Systems without graphics protocol support fall back to truecolor Unicode half-block rendering. The petdex gallery accepts community submissions, expanding the current sprite count beyond 3,200 options.
Hermes Agent Reaches 180,000 GitHub Stars
Hermes Agent, released by Nous Research in February 2026, has accumulated over 180,000 GitHub stars. The agent includes persistent memory, a self-improving skills loop, multi-agent support, and messaging gateways across Telegram, Discord, and Slack. Nous Research released the desktop application earlier this month. The pet feature appears in the Media & Web section of the documentation between Spotify integration and Voice & TTS features. Pets are configured under display.pet in user settings and operate independently of the agent's core functionality.
FAQ
What do animated pets do in Hermes Agent?
Animated pets in Hermes Agent display six animation states—idle, running, thinking, waving, celebrating, and failing—that correspond to agent activity. The pets are purely cosmetic and have no effect on tokens, prompt caching, or agent behavior.
How many pet sprites are available for Hermes Agent?
Hermes Agent users can access more than 3,200 animated sprite mascots from the open-source petdex community gallery. Users install pets through the command hermes pets install boba --select and switch between them using hermes pets select name.
When did Nous Research release Hermes Agent?
Nous Research released Hermes Agent in February 2026. The agent has accumulated over 180,000 GitHub stars and includes features such as persistent memory, multi-agent support, and messaging gateways across Telegram, Discord, and Slack.
