In brief
- Nous Research shipped pet support for Hermes Agent, giving users access to more than 3,200 animated sprite mascots.
- Pets react to agent activity across six states—idle, running, thinking, waving, celebrating, and failing—but have no effect on tokens, caching, or behavior.
- The feature works in the CLI, TUI, and desktop app, and can be popped out into a floating always-on-top window to track agent activity without switching windows.
Nous Research has added animated pets to Hermes Agent, and the documentation makes a point of clarifying upfront that they do absolutely nothing useful. That doesn’t mean they are useless: devs have been working on that for a while even before Nous implemented it officially.
The pets are small mascot sprites that sit in your terminal or desktop app and map their animations to whatever the agent is doing. Six states total: idle when nothing's happening, running when a tool executes, in review mode when the model is thinking, a wave when a turn ends cleanly, a jump animation to celebrate when a full plan finishes, and a failed state when something breaks.
The sprites come from petdex, an open-source community gallery with more than 3,200 options to choose from. One install command—hermes pets install boba --select—drops the pet into your profile's directory and makes it active. The feature is off by default and stays dormant until you specifically go looking for it, which is probably the right call.
If you want to change pets, simply install a new one and switch between pets by typing the command hermes pets select name
Rendering works across the CLI, TUI, and the official desktop app Nous Research launched earlier this month. In the terminal, Hermes renders the sprite at full fidelity if your setup supports graphics protocols like kitty, Ghostty, or WezTerm. If not, it falls back to truecolor Unicode half-block rendering—which sounds technical but just means the pet draws anyway, slightly fuzzier, like a low-res GIF from 2003.
It’s perfect to spend time and make the boring terminal a bit more human.
The desktop version floats the mascot on a canvas. Shift-click it to pop it out into a transparent, always-on-top window that stays visible while Hermes is minimized. Out there the pet shows a speech bubble—"working…", "thinking…", "your turn"—and a mail icon when a task finishes while you're away. It's a Clippy revival, except nobody asked it to be helpful and it therefore cannot disappoint you.
Nous Research specifies clearly that pets have no effect on prompt caching, tokens, or the agent's behavior. They live in your config under display.pet and decorate whatever's already happening—purely cosmetic, zero side effects.
Hermes Agent, released by Nous Research in February 2026, has crossed over 180,000 GitHub stars and a growing ecosystem of community tools and integrations. Most of what the team ships is serious: persistent memory, a self-improving skills loop, multi-agent support, messaging gateways across Telegram, Discord, and Slack. Pets shipped alongside all of it, quietly, tucked into the Media & Web section of the feature docs—right between Spotify integration and Voice & TTS. The petdex gallery accepts community submissions, so the current 3,200+ sprite count will keep climbing.