Nous Research shipped an odd little feature for Hermes Agent: animated pet mascots that sit in your terminal and do absolutely nothing useful. And honestly? That might be the best thing about it.
There are over 3,200 pet sprites to pick from. Each one animates in response to six agent states — idle when nothing’s happening, running when a tool executes, thinking when the model is chewing on something, waving when a turn ends, celebrating when a plan complets, and failing when things go sideways. They’re cosmetic, with zero effect on tokens or behavior.
Setting it up is easy. One CLI command downloads a pet and makes it active. Type hermes pets install boba --select and you’re done. Switching pets is just as simple.
The pets render at full fidelity if your terminal supports graphical protocols like Kitty, Ghostty, or WezTerm. If not, it falls back to Unicode half-block characters — a bit fuzzy, sort of like a low-res GIF from 2003. The desktop app takes it further: shift-click the pet and you can pop it into a floating always-on-top window with speech bubbles saying “thinking…” or “your turn.” It’s Clippy reborn, except it never asks to help you write a letter.
To be clear, the pets are completely decoupled from the actual agent work. No prompt caching changes, no token overhead, no behavioral tweaks. They live in your config file and just decorate whatever’s already there. The community gallery keeps growing too, with folk submitting new sprites all the time.
Hermes Agent itself launched back in February and has already passed 180,000 GitHub stars. The feature set is genuinely serious — persistent memory, multi-agent support, messaging gateways. The pets are tucked quietly between Spotify integration and voice TTS in the docs. A weird little smile in the middle of all that engineering muscle.
