Hermes Agent v0.15 Velocity Update: Faster Startup, Agent Swarms, Skill Bundles

Key Takeaways

• The codebase was refactored from 16,000 lines down by 76% — the result is faster startup, lower memory usage, and a lighter runtime overall.
• The Kanban board is now a true multi-agent swarm platform: drop a task in triage, Hermes splits it into subtasks and assigns them to parallel agents, all completing simultaneously.
• Session search is now 4,500× faster (20ms vs 90 seconds) and no longer uses an API call — it runs locally, so there's no token cost for searching past conversations.
• Bitwarden Secrets Manager integration replaces plain-text API key files — keys are stored in one encrypted vault and pulled at startup.
• Skill bundles let you load a full set of skills in a single command, replacing the manual one-by-one approach.

The Six Big Improvements

1. Faster startup. The giant 16,000-line monolith was split into smaller modules and trimmed. Startup is now sub-second on most hardware — no more waiting for the runtime to initialize before your first message.

2. Multi-agent Kanban swarms. The existing Kanban board gained the ability to decompose a single task into sub-tasks and assign them across multiple parallel agents. One instruction, a whole team executes it concurrently — previously everything ran sequentially through a single agent.

3. 4,500× faster search. Previous session search used an LLM call, making it slow (up to 90 seconds) and token-costly. The rebuilt search is fully local, instant (20ms), and free. Searching back through months of agent conversations is now effectively instant.

4. Security improvements. Bitwarden Secrets Manager is now integrated. Your API keys live in an encrypted vault instead of plain-text config files. The system also adds prompt-injection hardening to block attempts to trick the agent via crafted inputs.

5. Push notifications. Hermes can now send a notification to your phone or other devices the moment a task completes — eliminating the need to watch the screen waiting for long-running jobs to finish.

6. Skill bundles. You can now group related skills and load them all at once with a single command. The video demos loading a full browser-agent skill set from browser.sh in one step.

Commands & Code Mentioned

hermes update
hermes dashboard

Related on OpenClawDatabase

• Hermes Agent Hub — platform overview, setup guides
• Hermes Memory Guide — how persistent memory works
• Hermes Tasks Guide — Kanban and long-running task patterns
• Changelog — all tracked Hermes releases