v0.16 put Hermes on your desktop. v0.17 is about how far it reaches — into iMessage with no Mac relay, background subagents that work while you do, image editing, a grown-up desktop app, no-cron automations, and Cursor's Composer through your Grok plan.
"The Reach Release. v0.16.0 put Hermes on your desktop. v0.17.0 is about how far that reach extends — across new places to talk to it, deeper into the tools you already use, and out to the people running Hermes for a team."
— Hermes Agent v0.17.0 release notes, Nous Research, 19 June 2026
Already on Hermes? One command gets you there:
hermes updateLast release, Hermes got a desktop app. This one is about meeting you in more places and going deeper into the work.
About 1,475 commits and 245 contributors went into it. But you don't care about the count — you care about what you can now do that you couldn't last week.
Let me walk you through the ones that change your day.
If you have ever tried to put an AI in iMessage, you know the pain: a spare Mac running a bridge, breaking every other day.
v0.17 ships an iMessage plugin built on Photon's managed line pool. You run one login, authenticate with a code, and Hermes can text. No relay, no bridge to babysit, free to start.
hermes photon login, then text your agent from your phone like you'd text a friend — and it texts back, blue bubbles and all.Until now, handing a big job to a subagent meant waiting while it churned. You sat blocked.
Now you can fire one off into the background and carry on. The moment it's done, the full result drops back into your conversation as a new turn.
The image tool used to only create from scratch. Now it can take an image you already have and change it.
Same tool, same simple pattern — you hand it a picture and a prompt, and it edits.
The app went from preview to a serious daily driver. Rebindable shortcuts, real OS notifications, your own themes — and the big one: live watch-windows.
You can watch a subagent work in its own pane, in real time, instead of guessing whether it's stuck.
Setting up a recurring task used to mean cron syntax — that 0 8 * * * nonsense nobody remembers.
New Automation Blueprints let you pick a task by name, and Hermes just asks you what it needs. Same blueprint shows up as a form in the dashboard, a command in the CLI, or a chat with the agent.
Composer is the fast coding model behind Cursor. If you already pay for an xAI Grok subscription, you can now point Hermes straight at it over login — no separate API key.
Your Grok plan, Hermes's agent loop, Composer's coding speed. (The release also added Z.ai's GLM-5.2 and Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 to the picker.)
grok-composer-2.5-fast in the model list and let it rip on a coding job, billed to the Grok plan you already have.These updates — background agents, new channels, image editing — get a lot stronger when Hermes isn't running alone. The Agent Operating System inside the AI Profit Boardroom connects Hermes, Claude and OpenClaw into one dashboard with shared memory and shared context.
These aren't mockups. Each one came out of the same Hermes + Agent OS setup — a free agent that codes, and a pipeline that turns one topic into a finished video.
That free coding agent? It's a two-minute Hermes profile. The video pipeline runs on Hermes too. Both live in the Agent OS.
The headline features are the fun part. But a release this big is mostly the unglamorous work that keeps everything stable. The quick version:
My advice hasn't changed. Take a backup, then update — that way if anything surprises you, you roll back in seconds.
hermes backup create # first
hermes update # thenThe people who actually run agents in production read every release. The people who skip them end up reading patch notes at midnight when something breaks that they could have known about. Every update you learn compounds.
"It's just a point release, I'll skip it."
A point release here is iMessage, background agents, and image editing. The version number is small; the new reach is not.
v0.16 reached your desktop. v0.17 reaches everywhere else.
Updates like this land every few weeks. The Agent Operating System inside the AI Profit Boardroom turns Hermes, Claude and OpenClaw into one system with shared memory — so every new feature, like background subagents or iMessage, makes the whole thing more powerful automatically.
hermes backup create first. Update second. I'll see you in the next one ↗