The Hermes Agent v0.13.0 “Tenacity” release dropped on May 7 with multi-agent Kanban boards, /goal persistence, Checkpoints v2, and 8 P0 security fixes. Four days later, the project hasn’t just held its momentum — it’s accelerated.
Since May 8, the GitHub repository has jumped from ~138,000 to 143,510 stars (+5,500 in 96 hours), and 179 pull requests have been merged from 13 unique contributors. Here’s what’s landed in the immediate post-Tenacity window.
📈 Explosive Star Growth
At roughly 1,375 new stars per day, Hermes Agent is now the fastest-growing AI agent runtime on GitHub by a significant margin:
| Milestone | Stars | Date | Days |
|---|---|---|---|
| v0.12.0 Curator | 127K | April 30 | — |
| Community wave | 131K | May 4 | +4 |
| i18n + Skill Lifecycle | 135K | May 6 | +2 |
| v0.13.0 Tenacity | 138K | May 7 | +1 |
| Today | 143.5K | May 11 | +4 |
The project has added ~16,500 stars in 11 days since v0.12.0 — a trajectory that shows no signs of slowing — and the project would go on to ship v0.14.0 “Foundation” just 9 days later. Forks have reached 22,406, and the repository now has 9,960 open issues (a testament to the scale of community engagement).
🆕 New Skills and Features
Stocks & Finance Skill
Community contributor Mibayy shipped a new stocks & finance optional skill that integrates Yahoo Finance data with zero API key required. The skill provides:
- Real-time stock quotes and historical data
- Portfolio tracking
- Market summary and sector performance
- No external API registration needed — it uses Yahoo Finance’s public endpoints
This is a significant addition for developers building financial assistant agents or market-monitoring cron jobs.
Kanban Diagnostics: stranded_in_ready
Project lead Teknium added a stranded_in_ready diagnostic for the Kanban system — a new check that surfaces tasks sitting in the “Ready” column without a worker assigned. This makes it easier to identify stalled boards and unblock workflows.
API Testing / REST-GraphQL Debug Skill
The api-testing skill has been renamed and relocated to rest-graphql-debug, providing a structured skill for API endpoint testing, response validation, and debugging REST and GraphQL services directly from the agent.
⚡ Performance and Reliability
Telegram Adaptive Cadence
wilsen0 contributed a Telegram gateway performance optimization that tunes message cadence dynamically and adds an adaptive fast-path for short replies. The result: snappier responses on Telegram without hitting API rate limits.
Provider 402 Caching
Teknium landed a fix for provider retry storms — when an LLM provider returns a 402 (Payment Required) error, the agent now caches the provider as “unhealthy” with a TTL rather than retrying on every single call. This prevents cascading billing failures and reduces API overhead.
Docker Extra Args + Timestamps
Mibayy contributed docker_extra_args and display.timestamps features to the terminal and CLI tooling, giving users finer control over Docker container execution and timestamp visibility in agent output.
🔧 Nix and Infrastructure
Nix Container Entrypoint Fix
Siddharth Balyan fixed a critical Nix container entrypoint issue where chown -R was stripping the setgid bit, breaking hostUsers group access in Nix environments. This improves Hermes Agent’s compatibility with Nix-based deployments — an increasingly important use case as the project expands beyond traditional Docker setups.
Nix extraDependencyGroups
The same contributor added extraDependencyGroups for sealed venv extras, making it easier to manage Hermes Agent’s dependency tree in NixFlake environments.
🔒 Security
Env Sanitization in Quick Commands
0xbyt4 shipped a security fix that sanitizes environment variables and redacts output in quick commands, closing a potential information-leak vector. The fix also removes write-only _pending_messages state, reducing the overall attack surface.
YAML Parse Failure Warnings
A new config safety improvement from Teknium makes Hermes Agent warn loudly on YAML parse failures instead of silently falling back to defaults. This prevents subtle misconfiguration bugs where a broken config.yaml would go unnoticed until runtime.
🧠 Community Pulse
The post-Tenacity window has seen contributions from a diverse set of community members:
| Contributor | Notable PR |
|---|---|
| Mibayy | Stocks & Finance skill, Docker extra args |
| wilsen0 | Telegram adaptive cadence optimization |
| Siddharth Balyan | Nix container entrypoint, dependency groups |
| 0xbyt4 | Discord typing indicator cleanup, env sanitization |
| kjames2001 | Telegram edit overflow split-and-deliver |
| eloklam | Kanban search test cleanup |
| Gutslabs | Three defensive fixes from PR #1974 |
“This is what open-source at scale looks like — 179 PRs in 4 days across security, performance, infrastructure, and new skills. The Tenacity release was the headline, but the community sprint is the real story.” — The Agent Report
🔭 Looking Ahead
At the current cadence of ~45 merged PRs per day, the next release (v0.14.0) could arrive within a week. Areas to watch:
- Kanban maturity: The
stranded_in_readydiagnostic suggests deeper Kanban reliability features are coming - Nix ecosystem: Multiple Nix-related PRs signal growing enterprise deployment demand
- New skills pipeline: The finance and API testing skills point to a broadening of Hermes Agent’s domain coverage
- 143K+ and climbing: At this growth rate, 150K stars is likely within the next week
For developers who haven’t tried Hermes Agent since the v0.12.0 “Curator” release — or those who joined during the Tenacity wave — now is the perfect time to explore the post-release improvements. The project is available at github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent and documented at hermes-agent.nousresearch.com.