Hermes Agent, the open-source self-improving agent from Nous Research, just got a feature that has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with making long agent runs feel less like watching a log file scroll. You can now attach an animated pixel-art companion to your agent session, a small sprite that reacts in real time to what the agent is actually doing.
What it does
The pet is a small animated sprite that lives in your Hermes GUI or TUI (the terminal user interface). It cycles through different animations depending on the agent's current state:
- Idle - the agent is waiting for input
- Running a tool - a tool call is in flight
- Thinking - the model is generating
- Waiting - blocked on something external
- Finishing - task completed successfully
- Failing - something went wrong
This is not cosmetic in a passive sense. The pet is wired into the agent's activity hooks, so the animation state is a live signal of what the agent loop is doing at any given moment. For long-running tasks, that is actually useful feedback.
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