Luke The Dev (@iamlukethedev) on X

What it claims

The October 2026 Hermes recap by Luke The Dev reports 130 merged PRs in six areas: Desktop (17), voice and real-time (4), developer tools and plugins (35), security and secrets (10), integrations and chat (21), and stability and fixes (43). Beyond the headline features, it states several behaviour changes. Gateway replies, cron deliveries and the boot outbox are tested to be exactly-once through faults, crashes and DST changes, using delivery E2E suites in CI. A whole-codebase refactor cut source lines by 34% with "zero behavior change". Core-tool deferral saves about 6.5K tokens per call on Desktop and shrinks tool schemas by 49%.

How it works

The unified gateway is one runtime that owns every local session: classic CLI, TUI, Desktop, API, ACP, bots and cron. Classic CLI plugin commands now run inside the gateway, and disabling a plugin reaches the running gateway. Plugin API routes installed after server start are hot-mounted, so no restart is needed. A platform whose plugin failed to load at startup is brought back without a restart.

Updates swap code with git or ZIP at a single crash-safe commit point. A killed Windows updater no longer leaves gateways paused or resumes them onto a partly replaced tree. On macOS, sibling-profile gateways restart as a full launchd fleet so none stay on stale code.

Tool search defers core tools: a curated, event-triggered set sits behind a bridge rather than loading every schema on each call.

How to use it

Several defaults and interfaces changed and are worth checking against existing setups:

• The subagent iteration cap default rose from 50 to 250, with a migration. Shipped defaults are 250 iterations and 10 concurrent children.
• delegate_task accepts an optional output_schema for structured output.
• Desktop regenerate no longer silently archives later turns. Deeper rewinds need an explicit confirm.
• Cron keeps wall-clock hours and real elapsed intervals across DST. Overdue runs are labelled in status, list, dashboard and Desktop. The media-send timeout is now configurable.
• Plugins can be pinned to a commit from Desktop.
• Tavily is now an explicit opt-in web backend and is no longer in the keyless ring.
• /model provider:model resolves like provider/model on non-aggregator providers.
• /login signs in with a Nous account from a chat.
• Distribution updates no longer delete user-added skills or cron jobs. A docs-only local edit no longer makes hermes update roll back and exit 1.
• read_file transcodes UTF-16 files to UTF-8 instead of refusing them as binary.

New model entries are anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5 on OpenRouter and Nous Portal, claude-fable-5.1 on the same two, and FAL Nano Banana 2 for images.

Security fixes beyond the summary include a virtual-model alias leak in the API server, closed at write, read and recovery cache. Another fix stops a bot prompt from leaking the default profile's skills index and identity. MCP OAuth token requests can carry a per-server User-Agent. CI now rejects binaries and new files over 500 KiB unless allowlisted.

Limits

The page is a recap thread with one-line PR titles. It gives no version numbers, PR links, CVE identifiers or install commands. The 31 patched CVEs are not named. The iron-proxy firewall is described only as "credential-injection" for sandboxes, with no configuration or threat model. The 34% LOC and 6.5K-token figures have no stated baseline or measurement method. The 66 community plugins come from a Discord sweep, and the page does not say how they were reviewed beyond a new "maintainer-sweep submission rule".