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Nous Research releases Hermes Agent v0.15.0 with 4500x faster session search

Nous Research released Hermes Agent v0.15.0, modularizing the platform's core to improve developer agility. The update collapses the primary agent loop by 76% across 14 modules. This refactor enables a 63% faster CLI cold start, allowing the agent to launch and respond in under a second on mobile environments.
Core refactor
16,083 to 3,821 lines (-76%)
Session search speed
4,500x faster
CLI cold start
258ms (63% reduction)
New integrations
Bitwarden, ntfy, Krea 2, and others
Security
Brainworm-class promptware defense

This release rebuilds session_search to operate without an auxiliary LLM (a secondary model used for background tasks), making it 4,500x faster and free. It also extends the Qwen 3.7 Max integration with OpenRouter sticky routing to ensure long-running sessions remain on the same upstream provider.

Users can now deploy autonomous swarms using the Kanban orchestration layer. The update adds Bitwarden Secrets Manager for credentials and Skill bundles to load capabilities like HyperFrames with one command. The release is available now via GitHub or by running hermes update.

View the full update on github.com

Still wondering? A few quick answers below.

Hermes Agent v0.15.0, known as "The Velocity Release," is a major update to the open-source autonomous agent platform from Nous Research. It focuses on performance and reliability by refactoring the core codebase, reducing its size by 76%, and introducing significant speed improvements for startup and session searching.

The rebuilt session search tool operates without an auxiliary LLM, eliminating the per-token costs and latency associated with background model calls. This local architecture allows for instant discovery and browsing of past conversation history, achieving speeds up to 4,500x faster than the previous LLM-powered version.

Kanban swarms are a new multi-agent orchestration feature that allows the agent to auto-decompose complex tasks into a tree of sub-tasks. Using a Swarm v1 graph topology, the system coordinates parallel workers, gated verifiers, and synthesizers to accomplish goals collaboratively across a shared blackboard.

Hermes Agent now supports Bitwarden Secrets Manager to centralize credential handling. By providing a single bootstrap token, the agent can securely retrieve all necessary API keys from Bitwarden at startup. This replaces the need for plaintext environment variables and allows for centralized key rotation via the Bitwarden web app.

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