On May 28, 2026, Nous Research published the largest update in Hermes Agent’s history. The release, dubbed “Velocity,” integrated more than 285 pull requests from nearly 200 contributors in just 12 days. Two emergency patches followed within the next 24 hours.
Hermes Agent is an open-source artificial intelligence agent under the MIT license. It runs in your terminal, learns from experience, remembers across sessions, and works with any model provider. It belongs to the same category as Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Cursor, but with one difference: it is completely open and runs on your own machine.
Three developments in this release deserve attention.
The first is session search. Hermes now uses SQLite FTS5 to search across your entire conversation history. A query takes about 20 milliseconds. It costs zero dollars. It calls no language model. It’s a local database doing what databases do well. For an agent that accumulates weeks or months of conversations, being able to instantly and freely retrieve context changes the experience.
The second is prompt injection defense. The release includes what Nous Research calls “Promptware Defense”: shared threat patterns, memory scanning on load, delimiters in tool outputs, protection of configuration files against malicious writes, and credential leak prevention. For an agent that has access to your filesystem and can execute commands, this is not cosmetic — it’s security infrastructure. Some YouTube videos called it “brain worm defense.” The official term is more sober, but the system is real.
The third is the multi-agent swarm system: an orchestrator that coordinates verifier agents in pipelines. It also debuted “Tool Search,” which loads MCP tools on demand with streaming and autocomplete.
A couple of things circulating on YouTube need correction. One video claims the release integrated “more than 700 pull requests.” The official number is 285+. Another says the search is “4,500 times faster.” Official documents record ~20ms without specifying what it is being compared against. And the organization’s name is Nous Research, not “Noose Research.”
The Velocity release confirms a trend: open-source agents are catching up to proprietary ones in functionality, and in some respects —like free local search— they are surpassing them.
Main source: Hermes Agent v0.15.0 — GitHub