Hermes Agent 0.22.5 adds pluggable delegation backends, routing subagents by model or profile

Nous Research’s open-source agent tool Hermes Agent has released v0.22.5. GitHub lists the release time as October 23 at 05:28, while the release notes are dated October 22. The stable release consolidates about 81 merged pull requests since the previous version. The most consequential engineering change is a pluggable delegation backend: subagents can be dispatched through a model map or profile, and strategies can be switched during a session. Release notes

According to the official documentation, the existing delegate_task creates a subagent with its own conversation context. By default, it inherits the parent agent’s model and tool access. The official advanced-delegation plugin provides more advanced strategies: model_map lets developers list model options with names and descriptions, which the agent can then select from; profile_routes lets subagents use the model, credentials, skills, and role settings from a specified profile. This allows different configurations for research and complex debugging, though any cost or quality improvements still need to be measured in practice. Delegation documentation

Routing has explicit failure behavior. The documentation says that if a specified backend is missing or disabled, the tool returns an error instead of silently falling back to the default backend. In a batch, if routing is invalid for only one task, that task is rejected while the others can still run. Results include information about the route actually used, making it easier to inspect model selection and fallback behavior. Profile routing also brings in that profile’s credentials and terminal policy, so the route list has access-control implications. Delegation configuration and limitations

Switching strategies also affects prompt caching: ordinary configuration changes take effect in new sessions, while an immediate switch rebuilds the tool list and causes one cache miss. Engineering teams should prioritize validating route selection, errors when credentials are missing, and terminal permissions across profiles. Note also that the installer-based desktop app has not yet been updated with this release. A fully consolidated changelog is expected in v0.23.0, and the documentation may continue to evolve. Release scope